The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Marketing & Advertising:

How To Grow Sales And Boost Your Profits

About This Book

Businesses come and go and there are plenty of reasons for their success or failure, but the ones
that thrive almost always have one thing in common: they are good marketers. What does that
mean? It means they make all their business decisions based on meeting their customers’ needs.
Which products or services they sell, where they sell them, how much they charge for them, how
they encourage customers to buy them, and all the other hundreds (if not thousands) of business
decisions a good marketer makes start with a simple question: how will this affect my
customers?

This customer-first business philosophy isn’t something I invented. It’s been around since early
in the last century when the dynamic managers of their time realized that supplying the kind of
widget the customer wanted was more important than how many widgets their factories could
produce. In other words, the manager who wanted to grow his business turned his eyes away
from the factory floor and started looking outside—at the customers—to figure out how to
succeed. Thus began the study and practice of marketing.
Like many people, my introduction to marketing came in college. The classic approach divided
the discipline into four elements—the four “P’s”—Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. While
plenty of academics and others have tried to update, enhance, and expand on this simple scheme,
I still feel it’s pretty solid. It’s probably obvious to you, but here are what the four terms mean:

Product is the “what” of the business—as in “what should we sell?” You probably know that the
best answer to this question is “what the customer wants to buy,” but you’d be surprised at how
many companies try instead to build a business around “what can we make?” When you ignore
the customer’s needs and wants, you suffer the fate of the apocryphal buggy whip manufacturer
or, to cite a more modern example, you become pets.com, home of the hugely irritating sock
puppet mascot and proof that just because you can sell kitty litter online doesn’t mean you
should.

Price is market-driven, too, regardless of what your accountant tells you. Sure, you have to cover
the cost of your product or service (as well as the overhead of your company) with enough left
over to provide a profit, but you won’t be able to do that unless the customer is willing to pay for
it in the first place. Individual customers don’t set your price, but as a group—when they become
the market—their judgment of whether you’re delivering fair value can’t be ignored.

Place deals with the “where” of the business, as in “where does the product come from and
where does the customer get it?” This includes topics like supply chain management and product
distribution that are a little outside my areas of expertise, so I’ll just touch on them lightly in this
book.

Promotion covers all the ways you communicate with the customer—from advertising and public
relations to how your sales people interact with them in your store, office, telemarketing center,
or online. The personal selling facets of marketing are so important I cover them separately in
The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Creative Selling, but a great deal of this book is about other
forms of promotion based on good marketing practices.

My first job in advertising was as a copy writer for a radio station. It didn’t pay much, but I
learned a ton. Over the years, I produced TV commercials, designed print ads, and planned many
media budgets. But you never saw my TV spots on the Super Bowl or my print layouts in Vogue.
My clients weren’t gigantic multinational brands like Coca-Cola or Chevrolet. Instead, I created
ad campaigns for Casey Meyers Ford and Soda Boy (whose still-memorable slogan was “Oh
Boy! Soda Boy!”), advertisers in St. Joseph, Missouri, the small town where I grew up. My ads
were for local businesses, not national conglomerates. In other words, they promoted businesses
just like yours.

Working in local media as I did is a great way to learn a lot about all kinds of businesses. Car
dealers, grocery stores, clothing retailers, and home improvement contractors all have different
advertising needs. Some are looking for more store traffic, others want to expand their market
area. Attracting new customers, building loyalty in the existing clientele, encouraging repeat
purchases or introducing new product lines each require different tactics. There are a few
principles that apply to them all, but there really is no such thing as one-size-fits-all advertising.
Please keep that in mind as you consider the concepts in this book.
When you mention advertising to most people, they immediately think of the behemoths of the
airwaves—companies like Procter & Gamble, McDonald’s, or Wal-Mart. But big spectacular
national ad campaigns like theirs have little in common with advertising the way it’s done by
small businesses—the kind of advertising you do. In most respects, advertising your business is
harder.

Mostly, of course, that’s because you don’t have a gazillion-dollar advertising budget. You
probably don’t have a lot of expensive research to precisely define your market or a dedicated
psychometric laboratory to test your ads before they run. Your copy writer may double as your
store manager most of the time. Your art director most likely spends most of her time freshening
merchandise on the shelves. Your media planner? Probably the person who writes the checks—
you. In other words, your advertising isn’t designed and executed by a team of Madison Avenue
gurus, it’s the product of the good-hearted people who help make your business a success.

That certainly doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. Quite frankly, somebody who spends 90% of their
time talking to your customers (like your store manager does) is going to have an infinitely better
understanding of what they want than some clip-board-toting psychological profiler or white-
coated lab technician. You don’t need a super computer to calculate your media efficiencies to
the fifth decimal point when you’re trying to decide whether to promote this year’s Father’s Day
Sale in the Weekly Inkspot or the TV-49 Six O’Clock News. What you probably do need, though,
is a better understanding of what makes advertising effective and how to make it work better for
you.

That’s where The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Marketing & Advertising comes in. This book
offers you some basic rules that will help increase the return on your marketing investment.
Some of them come from my experiences creating ads and watching customers react to them as I
stood in my clients’ stores and offices as the campaigns ran. Others were drawn from the lessons
learned by small business owners themselves, from auto repair shop owners to nursery retailers,
clothing stores to insurance agents. As in all the books in the Dynamic Manager series, much of
this material was drawn from my conversations with thousands of small business managers and
owners. I filtered their stories through my own experiences as a manager and entrepreneur to
distill some sound guidelines on why and how you can market your products and services in the
real world. In other words, this book isn’t about theory—it’s about the real world of small
business marketing.

Versions of some of these chapters previously appeared as articles in various national business
and trade publications you’ll find listed in the bibliography; others were taken from my seminars
on marketing. I’ve also included several case studies of companies that depend on solid
marketing to succeed—often against great odds—as well as a few chapters about companies in
specialty markets that I found illustrative of good marketing practices. This book contains the
full text of two ebooks, The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Marketing: How To Create And
Nurture Your Best Customers and The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Advertising: How To
Grow Your Business With Ads That Work as well as additional material in the third section,
Promotions And Ad Campaigns You Can Use.
The book is organized to encourage you to sample, think about, and try out different concepts in
the daily operation of your business. It’s not a narrative or a text book; there isn’t a step-by-step
organization but rather a collection of useful articles that address practical problems in marketing
for small business managers and owners. My goal is simple: to give you some helpful tips and
perhaps even some inspiration to become a successful marketer.

--Dave Donelson