Now more than ever, we need an entrepreneurial spirit to stand out from our competitors and disrupt the market with innovative ideas and concepts. In this Hot Topic, we will share insights on how you can implement entrepreneurial marketing to find innovative solutions, without relying on huge budgets and significant resources.
Create with the customer, not just for the customer
Unlike the traditional business orientation that tends to create targeted campaigns that are product-focused or sales-driven, entrepreneurial marketing places the customer at the centre, constantly thinking of how to improve customer value and working with customers right from the start.
Today, customers are more than just consumers; they are also creators, they want to develop content and ideas – and if you ignore their input, you will lose an incredible competitive advantage. In practice, this does not mean spending huge advertising budgets but rather:
(1) Do more to encourage direct interactions with customers to understand their sources of satisfaction and identify areas of strength and weakness; follow up with your customers to report on progress.
(2) Open up access to customer insights for all employees to facilitate wider customer understanding. For example, set up listening stations where employees can go, either online or in an office, to sit in on customer calls.
Case Study: Data and network solutions provider Brocade identified their top 200 customers, who account for 80% of their sales, and worked with these customers to understand their needs, and create and deliver customised packages. The result was an increase in Brocade’s net promoter score from 50 to 62 within 18 months.
Entrepreneurial marketing: what can we learn?
What makes marketing entrepreneurial? And what distinguishes entrepreneurial marketing from traditional marketing? The key features of entrepreneurial marketing are innovation, being proactive and calculated risk-taking. Entrepreneurial marketing aims at making proactive use of opportunities through innovative perspectives – in other words, it aims at doing more with less.
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Conventional Marketing
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Entrepreneurial Marketing
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What about your organisation?
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Orientation and approach
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Customer-orientated and market-driven. Reactive and adaptive approach to the external environment |
Innovation-oriented and idea-driven. Relies on an intuitive assessment of market needs. Proactive approach, leading the customer with dynamic innovation |
Does your organisation show continuous effort to innovate products and services? |
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Context
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Established, relatively stable markets |
Emerging and fragmented markets with high levels of turbulence and creating new markets |
In what context and market does your organisation operate? Is it looking to expand into emerging markets? |
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Risk perspective
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Risk minimisation in marketing actions |
Marketing as a vehicle for calculated risk-taking |
What is your organisation’s risk-taking approach in new business ventures? |
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Customer’s role
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External source of intelligence and feedback |
Active participant in firm’s marketing decision process, defining product, price, distribution and communications |
Does your organisation define itself as “customer-centric” in terms of listening to your customers’ needs and offering new products to the market? |
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Strategy
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Top-down segmentation, targeting, and positioning |
Bottom-up targeting of customers and other influence groups |
What does your organisation do to create value for your current and/or new customers? |
Action Point
Using the table below, answer each question to assess whether your organisation’s marketing approach is more conventional or entrepreneurial. What would be the unique benefits and challenges of being more (or less) entrepreneurial?