What is the most misunderstood topic in business?

By David Ronald

It’s become increasingly clear to me that, for some entrepreneurs, marketing simply equals promotion.

For some people marketing is a website; marketing is a YouTube video; marketing is a press release.

Marketing is how you are going to evangelize the awesomeness of your product and why people would be foolish not to buy it.

To some people, marketing is simply selling at internet-scale.

The reality, however, is that marketing is much, much more than this. The concept of the marketing mix (sometimes referred to as the 4Ps of marketing) was introduced by Neil Borden in the 1950s and remains an insightful way to understand the role of marketing.

Most people are familiar with the marketing mix but here it is for those who are not:

• Product—includes considerations about functionality, quality, appearance, packaging, brand, service, support and warranty
• Price— encompasses list pricing, discounts, financing, leasing options and allowances 
• Place—spans ecommerce, distribution, retail locations, geographies, channel partners and logistics 
• Promotion—includes messaging, content, social media, websites, public relations, analyst relations, and tradeshows.

As this illustrates, marketing isn’t just a few, disaggregated, outbound activities. It is, instead, a comprehensive and strategic function that should be the kernel of your business.

Marketing is important and it needs to be done right—a study by CB Insights, a venture capital database, found that ineffective marketing was the eighth (of 20) most common reason given by startup founders when explaining why their businesses had failed. (Reasons that were rated less important included an inability to attract investors, poor responsiveness to customers and employee burnout!)

So, why is marketing often implemented poorly by small business owners? Ironically, marketing isn’t difficult—and I believe the reason it’s done badly is simply because many entrepreneurs are too busy addressing topics that are deemed to be higher priority…until it’s too late.

Yes, marketing is a website; marketing is a YouTube video; marketing is a press release. But marketing is much more than these. Successful marketing requires adoption of a holistic vision of what to make, how much to sell it for, where to sell it and how to educate buyers about how it benefits them.

Until then, marketing will remain a topic that everyone thinks she/he understands but that few genuinely do.

Thanks for reading.

Starting right with good brand design

By Sharon Lee

Welcome to the very first blog post by Alphabet, a collaborative dedicated to helping small businesses build and sustain momentum. Hello, I’m Sharon and my role is to communicate your brand promise.

What does that involve? Well, it means discussing your marketing goals and determining a strategy that leads to a brand identity that is unique and strong.

Some people asked me, "Sharon, why do I need branding?" The answer is simple: you will increase your company’s success with a powerful brand. A strong brand builds awareness, evangelizes your company’s story, pulls in customers and, ultimately, increases return on investment. A strong brand gives you an edge over your competitors.

A brand is much more than a name or a logo—your brand is the sum of all the creative touch points of your company. What I mean by touch points is the visual, auditory, physical, and even psychological aspects of how your customers experience your product or service.

In this post I’ll talk about how we’re developing the Alphabet brand and will keep you updated about our progress in future posts.

Many factors influence the design of the Alphabet brand. And individual items, such as the logo, website, brochures, email templates and white papers, must serve specific functions yet tie into the branding cohesively and consistently in terms of colors, typography, imagery, tone of voice and company theme.

• First, the logo. Our challenge here was to develop a logo that had both a corporate feel and a playful element—our primary target audience is small businesses and we know you guys work hard but also like to have fun once in a while. I think we’ve achieved this by designing a formal typography as the foundation of the logo, combined with the three-color, angled ABC (which also serves as our corporate mark).
• Next, our website. We had several constraints to work around here, not least of which was the need to make our website stand out in a space crowded with competitors. That’s why we are using bold colors (our red “pops” very effectively) instead of more traditional “corporate” colors. And, because we didn’t have a ton of money to spend, we wanted to avoid stock photography, yet build an appealing website—the letters, in assorted shapes and sizes achieve that goal (while subliminally conveying the variety of personalities and skills involved in our collaborative).
• Last, but not least, our corporate brochure. We decided early on to print this brochure and, having made the decision to incur that expense, wanted to ensure people would read it. That’s why we selected an atypical gatefold construct (our target audience includes engineers and we know you guys cannot resist figuring out how stuff works :-). And it’s also the reason why we designed a bold front cover and a different, but equally attention-getting, back cover.

The most challenging, and rewarding, part of any design is coming up with an original idea that hits home with its target audience. Plus, a successful brand identity needs to be flexible and able to move through different applications over periods of time, while sustaining its voice and vigor.

Defining a brand is like a journey of business self-discovery. And our journey here at Alphabet continues…