Lunch with the 'silent partners' - marketing & branding

I had lunch today with two of the folks running one of our portfolio companies and two of their not so 'silent' silent partners. I was asked to join in to help explain some of the background as to why we were taking the approach we were.

In short, I stressed the importance of understanding the product and how it fits into the different market segments, the portfolio company (www.fluidform.ca) was doing an excellent job of this. They understood what individuals made up their market, they stayed away from any efforts that didn't involve their markets and they did a superior job of making the benefits of their product clear to their target market(s).

They were not trying to be all things to all people.

One of the partners wasn't clear on how our marketing was working, we weren't advertising our products in many cases. Mid 2006 we switched our marketing from product based to corporate based or brand based, in essence, we were promoting who we are and what we stand for. This made it clear that we were there to work with and help our clients and not just 'sell a product'.
In this branding, it was made very clear that the organization never takes our products/customers/reputation for granted. We are down to earth, a partner of choice.

Next was long term vs short term thinking. I explained the concept of marketing around a theme that is long term, the foundation is Premium Precast Product, it goes to what the organization is and what it stands for. Our thinking doesn't go to the end-user, as it does with our competition, but to the designers, architects, integrators. End-users, for our market doesn't allow for our long term model to work but working with designers, architects, integrators makes the long term model work and work well. On the short term we still market to end-users but with a different model. The result; we push the product via the designers, architects, integrators and we pull via the end-user. It seems to work well.

All in all we look at market need, customer needs, gaps and we are constantly evaluating ourselves; performance feedback is key (on products/services, delivery, vs competitors). We plan to be proactive but realise that reacting to events is also a part of business life, though most of our reactions are now quite planned (if a happens, do x, if b happens do y, etc).

In the end we stated what is the obvious around the factory and the sales office; never look at what we are doing, always look at what we have to do and what we should be doing.

Lunch was enjoyable, these silent partners have never been quite so silent.