The traps of marketing

When companies all apply the best marketing practices, they tend to adopt strikingly similar strategies. They seem to ignore the fact that differentiation is the very cornerstone of marketing. Products and services have thus become commoditized, with a predictably negative impact on profits.
To avoid a certain number of traps that await many marketing practitioners, the following points are particularly relevant:

– Companies cannot be original or flexible if they use planning as the basis for strategic marketing.
Instead, operational teams should be entrusted with strategic thinking. Companies should also place new focus on qualitative approaches, rather than concentrating excessively on the numbers.

– Companies need to know when not to listen to customers.
Companies that bet everything on customer satisfaction will have a hard time beating the competition. Rather than attempting to satisfy every customer desire to the letter, companies should sometimes offer innovative products that may not precisely correspond to current customer needs.

– Companies need more than quality to retain customers and stand out from the competition.
It is sometimes more efficient to focus on reinforcing company strengths rather than implementing costly quality initiatives.

– Companies must do more than emulate best practices to design effective competitive strategy.
Companies often rely too heavily on benchmarking, an imitative technique, when devising their competitive strategy. They would do better to think about how to destabilize the competition.