3 Qualities of A Good Marketer

Always look at the bright side of life. The best marketers are always optimistic.

What are the qualities of a good marketer?  Even though marketing is a ubiquitous job, it is also a high pressure job.  You often have to meet goals and deadlines, which are at times challenging.  If you have a great brand that is growing healthily in a low competitive environment, good for you.  If you have a brand that has saturated growth, and competitors continue to nibble at your market shares, you need to tough it out.  A life as a marketer has its ups and downs, and you need the right qualities to weather them all.

The first quality you need is optimism.  Be happy when your business is growing healthily.  But when your business decline, do you get depressed, give up or get frustrated?  Yes, the environment may be tough, but a good marketer will always have the optimism to face the problem.  If the marketer gets negative or depressed, the energy will demoralize the team.  He will also lose energy that can be channeled towards solving the problem.  Optimism will help to channel all the positive energy to continue on, and to solve the problem at hand.

The second quality is discipline.  I have seen a lot of good marketers got swayed by new technologies or marketing fads.  Always, always go back to the fundamentals of marketing and sales, and incorporating them to your strategy and tactics for the long and short term.  Do not get desperate with unhealthy short term sales tactics that may affect the strength of your brands.

The third quality is focus.  Focus on a few key things that will grow your business.  Commit to doing them well.  Don’t get distracted by doing many things, and then at the end realized that you did not do your best in any of them.  Channel all your energy towards a few key strategies, and commit to do them well, better than all the competitors.  Even if you meet defeat, your conscience is clear, as you have put in your best.

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Work on the Strengths of Your Brands, not the Weaknesses

Focus on your brand’s strengths, and build muscles in the right places.

Let’s face reality.  Nobody is perfect.  Everybody has their strengths and weaknesses.  However, everybody tries to fix the weaknesses, rather than developing the strengths.  This is especially true in Asia where parents and bosses are just not satisfied with weaknesses in their children or subordinates.  If a child gets 90 marks on all subjects except for one subject where she obtains 50 marks, the parents will expend stupendous efforts, time and energy to focus on the weaker subject.

Same thing for a brand.  No brand is perfect.  You cannot be a brand that pleases every person on planet earth.  You cannot be a brand that is low priced, and yet offers you luxury quality materials.  Your product cannot be a sports car and yet be roomy enough to hold a big family.  You cannot be the best tasting beef burger, and yet boast of low calories.  Every brand has a strength, and that is what you focus on developing.

Volvo has strengths in safety of its cars.  Yet in certain years it tried developing powerful engines for sports cars.  Will the loyal customers of parents love how the brand is developing?  I certainly don’t think so.  Parents love Volvo for its safety, and now it has confused that strength with its sports cars.  If I have responsibility over the Volvo brand, the paramount objective is to strengthen its safety core even further, far away from the reach of competitors.  Volvo will be forever the safest car in the world.  It may not be the fastest, loudest and most sexy car, but it will be the safest car of them all.