There’s a lot to consider when you’re marketing your business or your organization. Your branding needs to be drenched in what you stand for. In other words, what you are communicating needs to show the core of what your business or nonprofit means. In essence, your mission needs to be singing the loudest with your core values carrying the tune.
This has to come through everything you do. It takes you right back to the marketing mix: Product, Price, Place, Promotion.
Whatever your mission is––whether you are the best at creating golf umbrellas or working to eradicate AIDS––everything has to meet your supporting core values. Most of the time, the core values are about serving the customer. In these two examples you can easily imagine that a maker of golf umbrellas wants to deliver a good product that serves the user—keeps the golfer dry in rainy weather. Their core values might be quality, excellence, high-performance. The AIDS organization wants to educate the public so that AIDS is not spread, they might also support research to create a cure or vaccination to prevent AIDS. Their core values might be health, integrity, holistic.
From those goodhearted goals, comes the product or service to help people. Following that is the price that meets the market, the place where the need is most prevalent, and the promotion to reach the market in the language that they speak (literally and figuratively).
Unfortunately, what we sometimes see is promotion that is offensive, hurtful and denies the presence of goodhearted goals. I just saw a quote on Facebook that essentially told me that the business who authored the post was greedy. Their goal was to make money, not serve the customer or better the world in some way. I am definitely in this business’s demographic and that small post turned me off completely.
It reminded me of reading a health magazine years ago and the inside back cover was a full-page cigarette ad. It ruined the magazine for me and I cancelled my subscription. Their decision to accept tobacco money flew in the face of what I perceived to be their core values—healthy, excellence, empowerment, wellness.
Simply put, when your marketing is not congruent from top to bottom, through and through, it fails, even if it’s just a Facebook post.
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