Whilst some forward thinking organizations have adopted marketing as a culture, mind set, and all encompassing philosophy to creating and delivering customer value, far too many still only look at marketing in its most basic form, that of the 4Ps, or even worse, in its most superficial form, promotion.
In this case, when business is in need of a turnaround, organizations engage in many promotional based activities thinking this will help drive revenue etc. This may be the case should a lack of branding etc be the bottleneck restraining organisational change, but in the many cases I see, especially in the fitness industry, this is not the case.
In fact, as I have written about elsewhere (https://strategycompetitiveness.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1197&action=edit ) strategy and marketing are converging as marketing (as a market orientation) is the bedrock of company performance.
Organisations need to address the underlying issues. This is strategy and marketing.
For operators of health and wellness clubs these are often issues related to poor member experiences which lead to lower levels of member retention, negative word of mouth and hence lower levels of new member acquisition. In addition, the poor member experiences are often a result of a less than stellar culture that creates demotivated and disengaged staff. This can become a vicious cycle of declining internal and external indicators leading to continued poor financial performance.
So, before you try to spend your way into a turnaround, think about the critical issues your firm is facing and get wide spread input from staff, customers and other key stakeholders (open strategy) so you can start addressing the key bottlenecks.
What to know:
- Firstly – what marketing is not:
- Promotion
- Clever logo and new brand name
- Run by the marketing/BD people
- Something that can be turned on and off according to prevailing conditions
- In its entirety, something that cannot be measured using ROI
- What it is:
- A business process about creating client value
- A firm culture that has the most significant impact on firm performance
- The guiding force for strategy and strategic management
- The bed rock of firm performance (market orientation)
Strategy & Competitiveness 