Perceptions carry the cost

Most marketers, suffering under the stranglehold of a tight budget and interfering financial managers, who have no clue or respect of marketing, need to redefine their pitch.

I have not understood why communication is one element of marketing that marketers hate or fear most. A few months ago I was the advising panellist at a tender briefing where a company wanted a communications strategy to stop the dwindling numbers of customers.

A whole lot of advertising agencies pitched for the job with glittering presentations. I was impressed by the thorough research that all the agencies had conducted on the potential client. They knew everything - how their products were priced and packaged, how many people the company employed and their qualifications/skills, and where the branches were.

However, or should I say as a result of their thinking, no single agency had cared to deal with the issue of perceptions - the other P in the marketing mix, at least according to me. The inferences and solutions offered all concentrated on some or all of the conventional 4 Ps - product, price, packaging and place. And interestingly, all but one agency suggested price cuts or discounts and product competitions. They were all convinced that if the price was dropped or tempered with, their client's customers would flock back and the haemorrhage would be halted.

I believe all the presentations were good. It came as no surprise to me that the marketing and communications director was very impressed and ready to sign a cheque to the preferred bidder. Even she was not concerned about what the customers thought about her company. She was convinced, like marketers, that customers react only to the 4 Ps and, nothing more nothing less.

But a few months ago this company, as far I am concerned, had suffered one major setback, which I believe was the major cause of customer flux and instability. For one reason or another the Managing Director and other senior managers had resigned and a few branches virtually stopped conducting business. Because this was covered in the media, I believe that customers were worried about the stability of the company and thought it best to take their business elsewhere. Our prolific advertising agencies and marketing gurus made no mention of this. They stuck to what they do best and always. The resistance to move the borders was just amazing.

Because of the historical bad blood between public relations and marketing experts, the two sides continue to ignore each other and they refuse to recognise each other's strengths and own weaknesses, to the peril of their clients. On the one hand marketers believe the solution always lies in advertising, exhibitions and promotions. They believe that billboards and newspaper splashes and radio or TV adverts are enough to attract clients and sell. It is not a coincidence that most marketing managers are also linked to sales. They are expected to market solely to sell and not create awareness.

Public relations specialists on the other hand, are generally conservative misers who believe everything can be solved by propaganda - a press release here and a radio interview there. They will not go beyond the borders of free publicity, because they are hung up on the notion that advertising has no credibility.

Whatever their compelling and smooth arguments, marketers must learn that one of the ways of dealing with customers - other than price, packaging, place and product - is to manage the customers' perceptions about their client. Believe it or not, there are times when customers do not buy your products, simply because of some perceptions about you. And as most marketers should know, perception is equal to the truth, which if not managed, can destroy your business.

Government is one victim of this problem. Take the local elections in 2000. That less than five out of every 10 registered voters turned up to make that cross was conveniently interpreted as voter apathy. Did government bother to find out why people did not vote? I believe that over and above the millions of rands government spent to "sell" the elections through their advertising, they should have also gone on a parallel campaign to deal with voter perception not apathy. They should have embarked on a campaign to explain the previous five years of local government and the plans for the next. Instead, government was just concerned to get millions of South Africans to vote again and return them to power, neglecting all the negative (and positive) perceptions that exist about government, especially local government. For me, there was no return on investment on the money used in the election campaign.

It is time marketers realised that their companies or clients are the same. They are in business not only because they have good, well-packaged products and price; they are also in business because the customers hold particular views about them. And those views are called Perceptions and they need to be managed.