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Charanjit Singh

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Charanjit Singh

PR Consultant and ICF Coach

CorePR

Blogs (2)

Charanjit Singh is a member of:

Future trend

Marketing is all about communication. Till the prospects are aware about your product and service, convinced about the need for it, they won't endorse your brand. The access to extensive communication tools, quick turnaround possibilities, engaging with customers through social media, augurs well.

Growth Prospect in marketing

It depends upon how quickly a marketing person becomes an intra-preneur within the organisation he/she serves. It is all about ownership, self-motivation, responsibility, and credibility that one generates with one's team and the customers that determines the speed of one's success.

Brief yourself

I started my career as a journalist in Delhi in 1980 and later moved on to a state government's public relations department as Assistant Editor, and then served with a German collaboration company heading their PR department. In 1987, I founded CorePR.

Importance of 4ps

To my mind, the 4Ps are People, People, People and People. Every organisation interacts with people alone within and outside the organisation. A clear understanding of people's needs exactly to the 't' can help make marketing of any product or service a cake walk.

Motivating

There is no success or failure in marketing. Every marketing person has to understand that so-called failure is just a learning opportunity and a stepping stone to excel and do better next time. Debriefing after any such 'failure' helps them understand the missing links in the presentations or the mismatch with the customer needs. Their success lies in first understanding the customer, the solution that the product/service shall provide, and listening. Most marketing professionals would start off with their presentation without listening first. Listening is the crucial aspect of any marketing success. And in so far as the motivation of the team is concerned, it depends on how you interpret their failure or success during debriefing. But even before that see to it how the executive owns up the corporate goals, how involved and responsible he/she feels in owning up the goals and show the commitment to achieve them. The outcome of their efforts shows them where they need to focus on

Suggestions to aspirants

Marketing is all about relationship building and not having a one-sided view of one's product or company only, and forgetting about the other end, the customer. In my view, 5 keys to be successful in marketing are:
1. Know your organisation and its products/services: Every marketing executive must be first an intrapreneur, i.e. be the owner of the brand, and brand ambassador of his organisation.
2. Understand your product/service inside out: What are its current usage. Its components and features. Its quality and performance. And more importantly, how it would help a customer find solution to his needs or problems.
3. Map your prospects or target audience: Knowing your customers is sine qua non to the success of a marketing pro. Create a psychograph of the customer.
4. Build lasting relationship with them and not just dumping your products/services.
5. Follow-up not only for feedback but to up-sell other products. A satisfied customer would refer you to many more in his circle.

Achieving Targets

1. Develop a comprehensive marketing plan.
2. Share it with your marketing team. Have extensive brainstorming session to understand their perception and whether they are convinced about the product/services?
3. Have complete situation analysis, and competitors' profiling to understand market realities.
4. Work out marketing strategies based on market knowledge. What promotions, offers, services, would help customer achieve better results?
5. Support it with customer knowledge. Have enough communication strategy to reach out to defined geographical regions and target customers, to get better eye balls for the brand. Media plan can be put in sync with marketing efforts.
6. Have everyone on the same page. The organisation's marketing goals must be specified and shared at all levels within the organisation so that a concerted efforts are made to achieve them.
7. Daily review of marketing efforts helps in understanding and streamlining the strategies.
8. Celebrate the success.

What can be achieved

There is no limit for a marketing person to help one's organisation succeed. Any professional has to keep just one thing in mind, that no work, as a professional, is a mere job. It is a complete responsibility, since existence of any organisation, its products and services, ultimately impact someone. The marketing person is the one who keeps the organisation sensitised about these human beings outside the organisation's four walls. It is the marketing pro who interacts with the outside world and lets the internal team of production people, the distributors, the dealers, informed about the market situation and people's perceptions and needs.
The moment any professional owns up one's job, the organisation, and the product/service one represents, it changes the entire perspective, and helps the organisation grow and succeed in the market place.
Such people are not very many in the market place. Be the first intrapreneur.

Branding

Branding is essential whether it is an organisation, individual, a product or a service offering. Branding is the sum-total of a customers experience; the values it represents; and satisfaction or delight it offers to the customer ultimately.
Branding helps organisation look within, improve its products or services that honestly meet the need of an individual or another business. Brands which enjoy more trusts are built on the principles of truthfulness and honesty. It is their credibility that helps them stand out and stay in the market place.
The brands communicate these values through a veritable permutation of all the five senses i.e. what people see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. Depending upon the product, these senses of a product interact with the customer to reinforce credibility.
It is essential that a professional communicators audits the entire range of an organisation's brand communication for effectively portraying its personality to the customers.

Importance of sales

Sales is the realisation of the ultimate objective of the organisation - to convert the prospects into customers. After the marketing has put in place the required infrastructure and supportive marketing environment, a sales person is able to convert those efforts into actual sale of the product/service to the customers, and keep the organisation afloat...and grow.

Importance of STP

In simple terms, it is all about knowing the 'People' you intend to serve. Segmentation helps you understand various customers in different categories, who would have diverse needs which the product/service intends to fulfil.
Segmentation makes targetting also easy, since one can chose from the kind of media consumption that a customer has to reach out with the appropriate message at the right time and in right format.
Position of the product is understanding your brand's character, the quality, and what kind of solution it intends to provide to customer. A single product may have diverse positioning options yet, at times, a single idea that can meet the larger needs could help. Or may be, at times, reposition the product for a particular segment could also helps increase sales.

Importance of Marketing

Having founded the northern region's first full-fledged public relations consultancy firm, CorePR, way back in 1987, the biggest challenge was of concept selling and telling people as to what we do. Marketing is an on-going process and objective is to make clients ready for the change.

Growth

Marketing works on specific goals and objectives. And if these goals are internalised and are in consonance with the organisation's objectives, the growth can be measured on day-to-day basis. Besides, that, the clear goal is how much one is able to contribute to the organisation's growth and success is another clear measure of one's own accomplishments.