Marketing local to marketing global, and speaking with a more global voice in doing so

The other day my wife and I were looking through a catalog sent to us for post-holiday season shopping, from a large and well known clothing and outdoor supply and equipment company. This business has been marketing and selling quality goods for generations now, with a home base and main storefront in the state of Maine, in the United States. And as part of their image and marketing they have traditionally looked for catalog models from the community around their main, flagship bricks and mortar store.

The problem is that much of their marketplace is more globally distributed now, and certainly when they are marketing and selling online. But their web site shows the same lack of any real diversity in its models or in how it markets. They seek to market and sell globally and to an increasingly diverse audience, and both ethnically and culturally but they actually reach out with a very limited and narrow voice and image.

• Should they bring in a more diverse range of models and include text that would specifically target a more diverse audience?
• Should they offer new variation product lines that would specifically appeal to new markets and audiences, with them identified through marketing research as viable sources of new business opportunities?

The initial thought that came to me when flipping through this catalog, and when then looking at their web site was that they needed more diversity in their models used in showing their clothing lines, so that a more diverse market audience could more easily imagine themselves wearing those cloths. That, in fact would be an easy first step in opening up their marketing and sales to a wider audience, and it is one that I would recommend if I was working with them as a consultant. But the real trick here is in developing a strategically balanced, more open marketing and sales and not simply in taking individual steps as if in a vacuum, and only with consideration of them when taking them. Some possible changes would be more involved and require a larger up-front development expense on the part of the business that new revenue would have to be able to cover for them to make business sense.

• If you change the way you develop text copy about your products offered online, you have to keep both your old and new target markets in mind and in sight. But at the same time you want to avoid being so culturally bland and neutral that you bore – that you cannot engage active interest with that would prompt a potential customer to complete a transaction with you.
• You may want to capture new markets and new types of customers but you do not want to confuse or risk loosing your current and traditional customer bases while doing so.

Finding the right balance of diversity and consistency in image is not an easy, formulaic-solution problem.

And if you in fact do try branching out to new audiences with new product variations you want to make sure that these product line innovations support your core mission and vision, and your ongoing brand – unless your business has reached a point where you see real need to significantly redefine itself. Then market outreach and innovation is about something else entirely – change management, and the topic of other postings.

Bring together your marketing and sales, and your product developers and producers. Bring in some outside marketplace-sourced insight for leavening. And put together as complete a list as you can come up with for steps you could take in increasing your reach to be able to capture more of a global market – while retaining and supporting your current marketplace too. Then, after you have opened this process up to as wide a range of possibilities as you can come up with, and only then – start looking at them in terms of practicality and expense, and in terms of their potential for return on investment. What would fit into your current business, and how? What would require change in what you are doing now and how, and at what costs and with what possible returns on investment? What types of synergies could you make in all of this, and with what potential costs and benefits? Then build a diversification marketing campaign out of that, with any new product line or other changes taken into account and developed as new sources of value – to the customer and to the business.

The basic principles I write of here apply to any business that seeks to make a transition from local and bricks and mortar only, to online and global. There is in practice, a lot more to that than simply setting up a new web site with a shopping cart capability.

The most important and valuable changes can be small changes that do not in fact cost much, if anything more. Modeling those sweaters in people of more than just a single ethnicity can be a real start there. So if nothing else, consider starting small and building out from there.

You can find this and related postings at Business Strategy and Operations – 2 and see also Business Strategy and Operations.