Coming up with a great new marketing idea for your business that doesn’t cost the earth need not be a pipe dream.

The great business thinker Peter Drucker once explained successful business in pretty simple terms. He said it starts with an innovation and then it’s all down to marketing. When you trawl through the marketing messages that have been burnt onto your mental hard disk, you know no truer business words have ever been uttered.

But this didn’t happen by accident — the architects of this business propaganda have started a product or service that had a competitive advantage, which answered the call of the market, and this was identified by listening to the market.

Next a first rate marketing plan was conceived and really great people were added to the mix. This is the anatomy of business building success.

All three elements are important but marketing is the make it or break it element. How many times have you heard “this is the best-kept secret”? There are plenty of quality acts, which ultimately fail as businesses because the marketing is hopeless.

It is often glibly observed that to do a letter drop is Marketing 101, but my analysis of the great business builders is that they have gone beyond the first-year course — they are graduates of Marketing 303 and then some.

Let me run through some star graduates — Richard Branson, Gerry Harvey, John Symond, Dick Smith, Joyce Mayne and Gai Waterhouse. The marketing around these people is so professional you don’t even need their business names included.

Of course, some superbly marketed businesses didn’t need the personality of the founder to spearhead the promotion of the operation. Businesses such as Janine Allis’s Boost Juice and Jack Cowan’s Hungry Jack’s are two cases in point. Allis and her husband, who was a marketing executive with Austereo, were so marketing savvy that they gave away a Boost franchise to a listener, which the radio network was happy to promote and gave the pair a media coverage valued over a million dollars.

Edward DeBono, who coined the term “lateral thinking” and “thinking outside the square” says the great marketers and business builders create their competitive advantage by employing this thinking.

They also create unique selling propositions that become instantly associated with the product or service. We all know that the burgers are better at Hungry Jacks, even if we have never eaten one of their burgers. We all could complete the jingle: “I like Bing Lee” and who doesn’t know who are the “Fresh Food People”?

Tim Pethick of Nudie fruit juice fame marketed on the cheap, but he came up with plays that you get by going beyond Marketing 101.

He used something called tribal marketing. Pethick turned up to events and gave away his products as well as a flyer, which tasters were invited to take to local shopkeepers to ask them to get Nudie into the store. Pethick actually got his potential customers to be his marketers.

This unusual approach to marketing underlines how lateral entrepreneurs have to be in their thinking to get the biggest bang from their marketing buck.

It doesn’t always have to cost a lot of money, but it will take a lot of time. The great business builders live and breathe their business. They carry business cards wherever they go. They are brilliant networkers and actually have planned how they network.

By Peter Switzer

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