This extract is the introduction to the marketing book“Chase One Rabbit: Strategic Marketing for Business Success. 63 Techniques, Tips and Tales for Creative Entrepreneurs”
(paperback, eBook and Audiobook)

Marketing is vital for any enterprise. But this is not because marketing is about promoting and selling products. Marketing is much more fundamental than that. It’s about designing your business with markets in mind. Strategic marketing focuses on choosing the right customers to buy your products, before you start to do any selling.

Strategic marketing is the vital matter of making the right products, selecting the best customers, and then managing the relationship with those selected customers. It’s about aligning your whole business to the changing needs of the most important customers.

I wrote my first book, ‘T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity’ to help creative entrepreneurs use a range of business techniques in ways that fit with their own creativity and values, to achieve the success they strive for. I wrote ‘Chase One Rabbit: Strategic Marketing for Business Success’ because, in my experience of helping hundreds of creative businesses around the world, entrepreneurs consistently seek my advice about marketing.

As a consultant, I help creative businesses become even more successful by advising them on the most important aspect of marketing – strategic marketing.

Most people misunderstand what marketing really means. They think it’s just a fancy word for selling. Often, what they are talking about is ‘selling’, but ‘marketing’ sounds more sophisticated. Hence the first confusion – that marketing really just means ‘selling’, ‘promotion’ or ‘advertising’. But in fact marketing is much deeper than that. Marketing is a much more comprehensive process of understanding your business, its position amongst competitors and its connection to carefully selected customers. The word ‘marketing’ is a problem because it means different things to different people.

Business owners often ask me to help them to improve their businesses. They think that I can help them to sell their product even if the business has much more radical problems. It’s as if they think that in my briefcase I have some kind of ‘magic dust’ that I can sprinkle onto any product to make it miraculously sell more. They think that marketing is just a matter of improving the advertising or publicity associated with their product. So they think that I will solve all their problems with some improved promotional tricks or techniques.

If only it were so simple.

Unfortunately I don’t have any ‘magic dust’, despite what clients want. If only! In fact I do help clients using my marketing expertise – but not in the way they first expect. I help them to increase sales and profitability by looking at the business in a much more fundamental way. This involves looking at the whole business from a strategic marketing point of view. I help them to devise effective methods to achieve their business goals. The result is a unique marketing strategy for each business. This book looks at the elements you need to consider in order to devise a unique marketing strategy for your own business.

Underpinning my advice to my clients, and to you in reading this book, is my approach to marketing, which makes a clear distinction between strategic marketing and operational marketing (operational marketing is also sometimes called marketing communications or ‘marketing comms’). This difference is crucial. And it is the mistake of not differentiating between these two aspects of marketing that causes so many problems in the first place.

This book explains why a strategic approach to marketing results in success. It’s full of real stories about entrepreneurs who have used smart strategic marketing. Many of these stories are about my own clients and some are from my own experience. The book offers a range of insights that can be applied directly to your own business. And it suggests practical things you can do immediately to make your enterprise even more successful.

Part One of the book then begins with a true story about a furniture maker called Nick and how he used strategic thinking to devise his authentic marketing…