What product are you marketing?

Different products require different methods of marketing. Everyone knows that. Are you using the right techniques?

Take candy. How would you market it? There are two main ways: in-store ads and positioning ads. Candy is an impulse purchase, so you want it to be very visible when someone is in a store. You also want to do position marketing, so people will remember your candy when they look at all the choices on the rack.

How about books? Websites, in a bookstore, email marketing, all of these work, as Amazon proves every day. Their problem is getting people to buy in the first place. If you're not a reader, advertising books won't make you want to buy. If you are, it may increase your purchases. In some ways this is similar to candy buying: position advertising to sell a particular book, and impulse advertising by producing interesting covers. The idea of buying a book for later is much stronger than buying candy for later though. Usually when you buy candy it's because you want candy now.

Now let's think of heavy machinery, say, a combine harvester. Ever seen an ad for one on tv? No, of course not. That is absolutely the wrong place to advertise. 99.99% of people watching tv will never buy a combine harvester. The trick is knowing that the 0.01% will buy, but they're not ready to buy now.

If you sell combine harvesters, or gas turbines, or pulverizers, or services that deal with those things, you cannot sell with impulse marketing, Nobody sees an ad for a wet gas scrubber and says ''Hey, I need one of those." For these kinds of products or services, the goal of your advertising must be positioning. It must be to keep your brand or service in front of a potential buyer for long enough that when he needs that product, he thinks of your brand.

One way to do this is by advertising in the appropriate trade journals. Another is by having booths at conventions. It is just as important these days to have a functioning blog and a regular newsletter. You can email or print and mail (or both) to keep your client informed. The day will come when they need that wet scrubber, and will remember your newsletter from a week or a month before. An inexpensive form of position marketing that works in the modern world.

P.S. What's the deal with those CSX ads you see on tv every now and then? Who is out buying rail service from television ads? Whoever convinced CSX to advertise on tv is some kind of sales genius. But not a marketing genius.