2023: The Year to Get Back to Basics -- Turning Common Sense ideas Into Common Business Practices

So, before you get caught up in the latest marketing trend, here are five common sense ideas for improving company business practices and processes. Check all these boxes, and I promise your company can deliver better customer brand value and better financial brand value for your stakeholders.

1) Focus your marketing efforts on your brand's most profitable users, aka your brand loyalists. Profitable brand users improve short term cash flow because marketers don't need to reduce prices for them the way marketers must for brand occasionalists. There is extensive first-party brand buyer data available today which makes it possible for marketers to differentiate between brand loyalists and brand occasionalists. Brand loyalists retain brand usage without much or any price reduction. Brand occasionalists buy the brand only when the price is reduced. And while brand loyalists account for as little as 10% of brand volume, they account for over 50% of profitable brand volume. And in today's uncertain economic times, wouldn't that be a more efficient way to allocate marketing dollars?

2) Create brand messaging and brand experiences that acknowledge consumer accepted beliefs, perceptions and emotions related to the brand and the brand category. For example, as a matter of practice, here's what the first sentence in every brief should be: What is the accepted belief, attitude, emotion or perception of the target audience about the product and/or category that the creative and media needs to address in order to sell the product?

Focusing on reduced brand prices, because that is rational, ignores the fact that humans react emotionally before they react rationally. By addressing the accepted belief, attitude, emotion or perception about the brand and/or its category as the first question in the brief, companies will help deliver FACTS: Focused Advertising Creativity That Sells.

3) Develop a deep and better understanding of Millennials and Generation Z because they are critical to the future financial health and well-being of brands. Marketers need to recognize the importance of those individuals born between 1980 and 2010, who now account for 40% of both U.S. population and brand sales, but by the mid 2030s will rise to well over 50%. And marketers need to have a deeper understanding of these young cohorts to know what motivates and engages them relative to other brands.

Here's what we already know: younger consumers are much more into brand experiences than they are into brand messaging. Examples include purpose branding, e-commerce, influencer marketing and experiential marketing. And first-party data suggests marketers can treat users of these engagements as profitable users by doing little or no price promotion. So from a brand profit standpoint, the Millennials and Gen Zers who are brand loyalists add both short-term and long-term brand financial value. Short term: improved cash flow via no price reduction. Longer term: continued full price brand usage.

4) Companies need to treat their established clients more like the way they treated them when they were new business prospects. You need to give them what they need, not what they want. You need to take a stand -- there's no room for wishy-washy thinking here. Don't settle for the comfortable. Don't settle for the conventional. And don't be boring! All the things you excel at when trying to make a good first impression.

5) Companies should embrace two-way mentoring. The most successful companies encourage senior executives to mentor junior executives for these reasons: to accelerate the younger execs' careers, to let them know senior management cares about them and to give the mentors perspective on issues and opportunities they and their senior management might be missing. This is especially critical with diverse talent who can help mentors better understand diverse mentees' community problems and opportunities and how their communities might perceive the products and services of the agency's clients and prospects.

As I said, none of these ideas, in and of itself, may seem mind-opening. But taken together, they will prove to be wallet-opening.

As we wade into these potential recessionary times, it is critically important that companies get back to basics to ensure they can accelerate how they are Connecting the DOTS -– the Developers of Transformation Successes.

To learn more, contact me at Connect the Dots.

Mike Donahue will be appearing on an upcoming episode of "What Next?" -- the podcast series hosted byRishad Tobaccowala.

Self-published at MediaVillage through thewww.AvrioB2B.complatform.

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