marketing

Inside every successful business, there's excellent marketing. If you're selling the right goodies to the right customers at the right price in the right way, you must win: get the marketing quartet wrong, and so will be the results.

Super-salesmen, true, can flog refrigerators to Eskimos. But super-marketeers find an irresistible use for fridges to create a lasting Eskimo market. Yet many businesses, great and small, rely on the brute force of selling and never think in marketing terms.

The terms are as simple as the quartet. For a start, 'don't go into a market to underprice. There will always be someone equally innumerate along in a month. Go for the profit.' This sage advice comes from Dave Patten, author of 'Successful marketing for the Small Business' (Kogan Paul). He lays down three basic principles:

1. Differentiate your product - the famous Unique Success Proposition, or USP. Why should customers buy from you and nobody else? The difference can lie in the goods or services (Post-It pads are a perfect example) or in delivery (computers by mail order, which made Dell's fortune). But without the USP you'll be a mere, unpromising me-too.

2. Identify your market segment. In a study of printing companies, the successes all concentrated either on type of customer (magazine publishers, say), or specific product (tickets, for example). The flops all competed everywhere, which is why they flopped. Patten adds an important rider: 'keep looking for something else you can supply to your devoted audience.'

3. Promote with purpose. The key question is implicitly asked by the customer: 'What's in it for me?' The USP gives only part of the answer. Patten says that 'Nobody buys things unless they need them.' These days, want is a better word. Promotion must tell people why they want the offering and how they can buy - and do so incessantly and consistently.

How does this platform translate into practice? Tony and Maureen Wheeler found their USP the hard way. Wheeler has an MBA from the London Business School, but despite a Ford Motor job offer, decided to travel the world by minivan on a £4 a day budget. The money ran out in Sydney, where people's curiosity about the great trek prompted the Wheelers to write a book.

Printing 1,500 copies of 'Across Asia on the Cheap' in 1973 cost £625. When sales, built by going round bookstores, reached 8,500, Wheeler knew he'd found an exploitable segment: to quote Forbes magazine, 'young seekers after adventure on the cheap.' Shoestring guides for South-East Asia and other areas followed - until India generated a 100,000-copy first edition hit in 1980.

The Wheelers now publish 156 world-wide guides (including Western Europe and the US) from Melbourne, with sales offices in San Francisco and London, and turn over £7.5 million. The guides themselves, displayed prominently in bookstores, are a means of continuous promotion for the brand - Lonely Planet.

That title more or less fits Patten's bill: 'Start with a good name, memorable and preferably illustrative of what you do.' (His own trading style is Merry Marketing. 'It invariably brings a smile to whomever I am addressing and people remember it'). Urban Outfitters is another name that tells a story - and a profitable one.

This Forbes 'up-and-comer' was launched by Richard Hayne after working with Eskimos in Alaska (whether he sold them fridges isn't recorded). He developed the USP and the segment as a friend's MBA project: a suitably unsmart shop selling 'hippie-type paraphernalia, psychedelic posters, Indian print fabrics, scented candles and used clothing.'

After 23 years, there are 20 shops selling annually $110 million of housewares and clothes that are either used or look it. The prices are low, but not the mark-ups. And like Wheeler's guides, the stores promote themselves - purposefully and consistently. Urban Outfitters maintains a costly network of young trend-spotters to keep the hippiness up-to-date.

As for 'looking for something else you can supply to your devoted audience', the chain is now trying to catch its grown-up hippies with a new store concept. So marketing does work, even from the base of one $300-a-month store. Today Hayne is worth $90 million.