How We Make Stuff Now by Jules Pieri

Author:Jules Pieri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2019-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

13

MARKETING

Marketing is a tale of two cities. First there is business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing—the stuff that builds awareness and drives sales for your company, especially directed at the target user of your product. Second, there is business-to-business (B2B) marketing aimed at attracting wholesale orders from retailers or resellers. They are two very different disciplines with vastly different channels and opportunities, but they can (and should) work together to improve the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts. The more successful you are at building a favorable and well-known consumer brand and product awareness, the easier it will be to attract wholesale orders. And the inverse is true as well. The more successful you are at attracting wholesale orders, the more consumers will be exposed to your products, which will help build your brand and increase consumer demand. The focus of this chapter is solely on consumer-facing marketing. I will address the topic of wholesale marketing in the next chapter, as part of the larger topic of gaining retail distribution.

First, I need to get a bias out of the way. I started The Grommet largely because I thought that marketing a new product was too difficult and expensive for most young companies. The most fundamental thing we do at The Grommet is build awareness and credibility for a previously unknown product and company. So to a certain extent, we are the marketing engine for many companies. I still believe marketing is the single hardest challenge for the aspiring Maker.

But we can’t work with all worthy companies and products, so The Grommet cannot be the answer for 99 percent of organizations.

Fortunately, there are marketing activities that are totally within reach and even better done by a small company than a large one. To begin, you can have a credible presence online very quickly—via a website, Facebook, or Instagram. You don’t have all the processes and approvals of a big company—you just get it done. You feel out platforms and pick the ones that you believe you can manage most effectively. Whichever platforms you use, be sure to express a coherent brand and visual identity (discussed later in the chapter). It is impossible to be credible without at least a basic online presence.

A small company’s advantages are largely related to the ability to create an authentic and responsive presence on social media, gain press coverage, and provide a personal customer experience. But because these competitive advantages depend more on human capital (blood, sweat, and tears), they are hard to scale. For some companies, these activities will prove to be enough to meet their ambitions or financial needs. For a company with large capital costs (such as tooling) or a product that depends on gaining national shelf space (like a personal care product or a food) or with big growth ambitions, these guerilla activities will not be enough. I will address these scaling activities later in the chapter.

When I think of Marketing with a capital M—this is the stuff that delivers brand awareness and leads to true scale and growth.

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