Field of Dreams Marketing Part 2

In the previous post, the focus was on "Field of Dreams" Marketing--where you build a nice company with nice products and people and expect customers to flock to it, only to be disappointed.

Here's a way to tell if you're engaged in a Field of Dreams Marketing approach. Are you surprised that a competitor of yours has mediocre or poor product yet does very well? Or that your customers don't understand how great your product is?

In our sound byte world, the customer will give you only a few moments to differentiate you versus the competition. The simplest answer is to develop your elevator speech so that any customer or prospect can quickly understand just how great you are.

If you can simply articulate what makes your company special, that's a start. That message needs to be repeated in every communication you do from internal marketing to your sales channel and on into your external advertising and marketing.

If you can't articulate what makes you special, why should we expect customers to do just that?

Field of Dreams Marketing Part 1

Remember the Kevin Costner movie where the guy was building a baseball field in his backyard so that his late father and other great baseball players would appear and play ball? The recurring line in the movie was "build it and he will come."

Field of Dreams Marketing or "Build it and they will come" is the marketing approach of too many companies. It's tempting to think that if you build a good company--good quality, good people, good pricing, etc.--that the customers will come.

No matter how good your people or product are, if customers can't succinctly understand what you do and aren't excited about it, they will not come.