Sweet Spot: How to Maximize Marketing for Business Growth

What if your business could make growth and innovation look easy? What if you could beat the competition day in and day out? You can. Sweet Spot shows you how to align all the vital parts of your business to create a competitive advantage and long-lasting success. You’ll learn how to bring smart marketing together with good leadership to find your business’s sweet spot.

Table of Contents:
Introduction xiii PART ONE Marketing needs to change. To get a sense of marketing the way it should be, you need to understand how companies get into the sweet spots of the business world. 1 Marketing, Sweet Marketing 3 My journey, so far, has taken place on different continents; but it has also been a journey of finding a new way to think about marketing. 2 Sweet Spotting 21 It’s an elite league. Sweet spot companies come in an array of different sizes and come armed with their own uniquely sweet recipes. 3 The Qualifying Rounds 37 What’s the game about? Sweet spotters move the market, become an alluring investment, outdate to innovate, create a boffo buzz, court competition, and exude Z-Leadership! 4 Growing around in Circles 63 And then there’s the big picture: Understanding growth and the concept of full-circle marketing. The root of your growth strategy begins here. PART TWO How do you get into a sweet spot? You develop the right skills, marketing skills. You have to mine minds, demarcate demand, turn your logo into an icon, mobilize champions-in-chief, and employ advocates—not workers. 5 Mining Minds 81 Sweet Spot Skill #1: Learn to march to the beat of the buyer. To do that, you have to do more than love the customer: you have to think the way he thinks and grow the way he grows. 6 Demarcating Demand 109 Sweet Spot Skill #2: Avoid “everybody” traps; they’ll lead you where everyone else is heading. Reinvent your market. Link your seller specs to the buyer’s specs—then add a tad more. Build competitive moats. 7 From Logo to Icon 135 Sweet Spot Skill #3: Brands are the heart and soul of sweet spot companies. At its peak, your brand becomes a product generator and value creator. This does not happen by accident. Brands must be created and nurtured; brands must be built to move from logo to icon. 8 Champions-in-Chief 163 Sweet Spot Skill #4: Make your top executives the first new members of the marketing department. It’s a good thing if your C-suite residents become overtly identified with your company’s product line. Are your top executives on a campaign? 9 Employ Advocates, Not Workers 187 Sweet Spot Skill #5: Market from the inside out! Don’t sleep easy until all your employees are on the sales team. How to start? Create employee heroes. Most importantly, listen until it hurts. 10 The Stuff That Marketing Is Made Of 211 When the going gets tough, the tough keep marketing. Goals are important. Skills are critical. Now, let’s check your attitude. Notes 223 Bibliography 232 Index 234

About the Author :
Arun Sinha is the Chief Marketing Officer at Pitney Bowes, where he is respons-ible for marketing, brand management, public and media relations, Web strategy, and marketing research worldwide. Throughout his career in senior marketing positions, he has successfully launched twenty new brands and grown the brand equity of many world-renowned brands at Colgate-Palmolive, the Ford Motor Company, Philip Morris, and Pitney Bowes.