I’ve developed many different campaigns for a wide variety of clients in many different business categories. In the process I’ve come across a handful of practices that seem to separate the category winners from their competitors.

If you think you’ve got the best product or service and want to go global, here are six mission critical marketing strategies and tactics that need to become integral to your operations.

#1: Leading Brands March to their Own Drum

If you’re marching to the beat of your own drum, you’re a leader. If you’re not, you’re a follower. It’s that simple. Leaders think differently and seize the opportunities found on the path they choose. The products and services they offer are a tangible response to a problem or opportunity they have discovered. While leaders are aware of what their competitors are doing, the competitive activity (or lack of it) helps define their pace and timing helping them decide when and where to strike out in a new directions.

Product Managers are followers who “compete” for established trade routes with “bigger”, “better”, “faster” or “cheaper” solutions.

Leaders don’t talk price unless they’re in the discount business, because “price is what you should talk about when you have nothing else left to say”. Talking money trains customers and prospects to think about getting the best price, not the best value let alone the best product.

Leaders hunt relentlessly for meaningful ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. Leaders defend their territory with multiple brand advantages that, in the consumer’s mind, represent a mental, physical or spiritual advantage. Price is not an advantage. For most brands it is their Achilles heel.

Leaders reinvent themselves and the brands they serve time and time again because change is their constant.

#2: Leaders Understand, Respect and then Redefine the Economic Terrain

Many leaders come across as adversarial because they’re not “team players”. Guess what? They’re not. They’re team-leaders. There’s a difference. Leaders get clear vision by doing a lot of homework (called research) to help them and the brand they serve understand the economic terrain. When they have enough data, the terrain looks like a geological map that defines – in three dimensions – any area’s business strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Leaders surround themselves with insightful stakeholders that help them define a business model that maximizes opportunity and minimizes stakeholder investment risk. Solid values ensure that all customer-facing team members handle opportunity and adversity in the same predictable and prescribed manner – buying management time to decide if an alternate course of action is warranted or ill-advised.

#3: Leaders Create or Manage Brands that Serve Tomorrow, not Yesterday

Leaders reinvent themselves and the brands they serve time and time again because change is their constant. Their experience is made up of successes and failures that help define the frequency and odds of success and failure for everything from OBT to USP.

Past wins fund tomorrow’s research.
Past losses are write-offs, little more.

#4: Leaders Understand that Audience Segmentation is Mission Critical

Leaders analyze their sales using metrics that are congruent with their brand’s mission, vision and values and define their ideal target group as those customers who enable them to achieve their stated brand goals.

1. They build segmented databases featuring primary and secondary clients, prospects and suspects.
2. They take care of key accounts themselves – because having skin in the game matters.
3. They assign dedicated account managers to their high volume \ high value clients.
4. E-marketing allows them to stay in touch with (secondary) clients, prospects and suspects in transition.
5. Their supports build and refine suspect databases that turn suspects into prospects.
6. They re-market to increase product and service conversion rates.
7. They use both online and offline advertising to move new suspects through the marketing funnel.

#5: Leaders Partner People, Products and Services

Leaders segment their products and services along one line, their audience along another line and media alternatives along a third line to ensure the right product is presented to the right audience using the right medium. They take pride in their ability to create opportunities for their brands, customers and prospects to meet.

#6: Leaders Stay Out of the Trenches (most of the time)

While leaders do not underestimate the importance of re-winning their customer’s loyalty with every transaction, they do understand that the game is lost if they lose perspective. Leaders enter trenches to reacquaint themselves with day-to-day issues and keep in touch with key accounts, but leaders keep on moving because they need to keep one eye on and remain one step ahead of the competition.

In today’s fast paced world, leaders and their key supports use business, personal and social sites to market their product and services, monitor the competition, communicate and survey their audiences… all in real time.

Their online media sites are like familiar beacons that serve them well 24/7.

Because they march to their own drum, they have far more genuine news and views to share and have more interesting stories to tell (than the 5,000,000,000th follower). Leaders tell the world who they are, what they’re up to and what sets them apart from others.

They network with like-minded brands and people.
And in time more and more followers follow.

Rule #1:         Expect Volatility

We are seeing an exponential increase in the velocity, complexity, and unpredictability of change. This increase creates a hypercompetitive business environment – locally and internationally. Thinking and doing things the way you did a few years ago is simply not an option. We are part of a Global economy.

 Rule #2:         Invent New Rules

Because turmoil churns up new opportunities seize the moment and invent your own new rules of engagement and make others follow you! Competitive advantages and profits will belong to innovators who transcend the existing parameters of competition. Don’t think desk-top or laptop, think smart-phone.

 Rule #3:         Innovate or Die

Develop conscious strategies and mechanisms to promote consistent innovation. Resting on your laurels is simply not an option: winners are innovating and surpassing themselves constantly. Don’t just track planned product use. Explore product adaptations.

 Rule #4:         Break Barriers

You must dismantle the internal barriers that used to define people, departments and disciplines. The boundaries between firms and their outside suppliers, customers and sometimes even competitors are also under severe pressure. While we all want to win, competitive is “out” and “collaborative” is in.

 Rule #5:         Be Fast

Under-promising and over-delivering is everything and in that context fast is better than good. These days it’s far better to be 80 percent right and on time than 100 percent right and miss the boat. Think Blackberry Playbook.

 Rule #6:         Think Like an Entrepreneur

The days of depending on corporate size and reputation to drop opportunities in your lap are over. Entrepreneurs go out and make things happen and allow themselves to fail and improve because of it.

Manitoba has ~78,400 businesses. Only 800 have more than 100 employees. 

 Rule #7:           Global and Local are the same

The fastest growing markets in the world today are outside North America.  Companies and individuals in Winnipeg shop here, in Grand Forks and in China all on the same day. What can you offer your customers that the rest of the world can’t?

 Rule #8:                     Never Stop Learning

At the end of the day, the only truly sustainable competitive advantage will be your ability to learn faster and better than your competitors, and to turn that learning into new products, services and technologies before your competitors can imitate your last innovation. Consider this: information that is now FREE to download from thousands of websites used to cost thousands of dollars. It’s all there. All you need to find is time.

 Rule #9:                     Measure Performance Differently

Concentrate on key strategic and profitability drivers, ones that reveal the underlying dynamics of your business, focus your energy on what really drives the future success of your business. Do you have a business plan?

 Rule #10:                  Be Nice        

In a world where (digital) change is the constant, some forget that in the end it’s still about you and me. If I don’t trust you – you’re toast. I’m moving on. Share of heart is still a prerequisite to share of mind and wallet.

For the last 35 years I’ve been exploring the concept of creative visualization through the teachings of Yoga, Mind Dynamics and Nuro-Linguistic Programming. These schools of thought share a common belief: that you are what you believe yourself to be. And if you aren’t what you want to be – you can get there one dream at a time. Until recently I was more of a skeptic than a believer. Here’s why.

About six years ago one of my career paths came to an end. When I recovered from the initial shock that can accompany a significant loss I asked myself what I’d loved most about my professional journey so far, and what I’d gladly leave behind forever. Within hours of asking the compound question I dreamed a seemingly hopeless, yet elegantly simple answer.

I would like to parachute into a market, solve a client’s problem, and then return home.

Between the moment I had the dream, and believed the dream three years went by. But because it was the right dream, one that resonated with me at the intellectual, emotional and spiritual levels, my subconscious inched me forward towards that dream despite the hurdles I and life put before me.

My father became ill and then passed away. During that time I spent a lot of time supporting him and my mother. After he died my wife and I moved from Toronto to Winnipeg to care for her father who was dying. We stayed there for 1 1/2 years until he too passed  away. A year ago we returned to Toronto to be with my mother (91) and pick up where we left off.

While we were in Winnipeg I started supporting a small agency with a dream similar to mine. Now we help each other. Each day I go to my office in Toronto and do a mental commute to Winnipeg where I spend the day online, on the phone and on my own, solving problems creatively using my many years of agency experience.

While some days are a nightmare – it really is a dream come true.

I invite you to dream your way into a better reality too!

This is my number one Son Ian.

A few years ago he called me and asked me about a decision he was preparing to make: he wanted to become an aircraft mechanic.

I told him that I agreed with his careers direction because it’s an ‘international ticket’ that would enable him to work all over the world (with-out retraining) and it made use of his formidable computer programming and mechanical reasoning skills. I went on to tell him those were the NURTURE reasons, and that there were some NATURE reasons he should know about as well.

When my father was in his teens (in Germany) he was expected, by his father, to apprentice in the family’s cabinetmaking business. Although he did so, his young heart was  in the next village over where his uncle was experimenting with powered gliders. I didn’t know that until I was in my 30′s. Bear that in mind as you read on.

When I finished high-school I went to an orientation at Ryerson Polytechnic. I explored two avenues: Aeronautical Technology and Business Administration. I ended up studying Business because I didn’t have the math skills needed for A.T.

Shortly after I graduated from Ryerson and began my career in advertising, I had the opportunity to move to Germany and apprentice with B.O.A.C. as a freight manager. I was very tempted, but didn’t for a bunch of reasons that I won’t go into here.

Importantly, this new information helped Ian understand that while the environment he was nurtured in had prepared him to succeed in the aircraft service & support field, something in his nature (or gene pool) seemed to be directing him towards that professional community as well.

With his heart and head in alignment Ian went off to school.

1.2 way through his basic training Ian found his calling: rotor-wing (versus fixed wing) aircraft service.

Since graduation in March 2010 Ian has been knocking about, looking for a place to park his tool-chest.

Today Ian hired on with Bell Helicopters in Winnipeg as  a Helicopter Mechanic Apprentice.

I’m all smiles because his news allowed me to relive my first day – can you remember the thrill of yours?

This is my mother Julia. She’s 90. At Christmas she gives us money because she doesn’t understand how her own remaining five children, the grandchildren and the great grandchildren navigate life. The price of things, the speed at which things come into and go out of fashion – it’s all too much for her. Interestingly – when she asks her kids what she should get their children, they’re not so sure either. They too are amazed at the pace of change in their lives. Interestingly, the kids enjoy the money because they can do what-ever they want with it. But my mother doesn’t think giving money is a gift because it takes no thought or insight. For my mother a good gift should be a creative revelation for the recipient.

Segue to Frank Wehrmann on creative design and branding.

When I am asked to design an advertising campaign or comment on one, I ask to see the consumer U&A research first. If the client doesn’t have any but is prepared to do some, great! There’s hope. 

If not, odds are that I can’t help the client. 

Like my mother, the people at the top are not in touch with what’s going on at the street level. They just pretend to be. They see people shopping and see lots of stores having sales. So when some stupid ad agency tells them they need to do a sale as well, they’re more than willing to do one. Follow the leader – like little lemmings to the sea.

Like my mother, I don’t think giving away money is very creative or insightful. Actually it’s pretty stupid. If they were smart they would add, rather than chip away, at their brand’s fragile value proposition.