Most dealer-owners in the kitchen and bath industry exhibit an internal orientation with respect to their core capabilities. They have a fixation on the products and services that their companies provide. As a result, you could easily classify them as an “operations company.”

Conversely, “marketing companies” exhibit a strong external orientation. When they think about their core capabilities, they consider how these capabilities need to be packaged to suit changing customer needs or a whole new range of customers.

If more dealer-owners in the kitchen/bath industry adopted this external marketing orientation, they would experience a leap in revenue growth and gross profit margins.

The Marketing Job

It would be nice if you could just perfect the products and services you provide, and in doing so, be assured that your firm would succeed. But, in reality, you must be continually finding ways to give customers the benefits they want. And that usually requires going well beyond the base product/service you currently offer.

Every product/service goes through a life cycle of pioneering, growth, maturity and decline. When your main line business enters the maturity stage, you’d best have other things in the growth stage to maintain high levels of profit.

Simply put, a “marketing company” recognizes the difference between the primacy of need versus the primacy of product/service. A marketing company’s concept is that all the things you do for the client over and above the actual products/services themselves will determine whether the client will buy from you – or not.

Indeed, the famous business management professor Peter Drucker once said: “The number one purpose of being in business is to get and keep customers, not to make a profit. If you do a good job of getting and keeping customers, you will make a profit.”

So the successful marketer’s credo must be: ready, fire, aim. Because time is the marketer’s most valuable asset, and a commodity is his worst liability.

Your Generic Business

From a marketer’s perspective, the business you’re in is not defined by what you do or the products/services you furnish. Rather, your business is defined by the ultimate benefits your clients enjoy from using your products/services.

When asked by a young woman at a social gathering what business he was in because she didn’t recognize him, Charles Revson was heard to say: “Why madam, I am in the business of hope.” His product was cosmetics, but he was extraordinarily successful because he marketed hope – the eternal quest of all women to look young and beautiful.