Better Marketing Strategy Starts With the Right Problem

Consider this common business situation. The past two quarters’ profitability numbers came in far lower than projected. Management is called into a boardroom for a special marketing strategy huddle. The question on the whiteboard is: “What are three products we can introduce in the next 30 days to increase profits by 20%?”

Managers accept the challenge enthusiastically. A few volunteers leap up and start a bullet-pointed list of ideas. The next two hours are spent examining the list and figuring out which three can feasibly be implemented within 30 days. Finally, managers are assigned to committees that will create implementation plans and report back in a few weeks.

Been there?

Unfortunately, this process often ends in frustration. Product development teams race to meet deadlines without a clear understanding of what customers actually need. Marketing teams write messages intended to convince people that these new products are valuable. Sales teams hustle to make their quotas. Customers are presented with more choices than they may have wanted in the first place.

There’s a lot of activity, but there isn’t much strategy.

The problem started with the question on the whiteboard. Management jumped directly to a solution—three new products—before figuring out what problem needed to be solved.

Good Marketing Strategy Starts With the Customer

At its heart, business is fairly straightforward. A customer has a need, a problem, a desire, an inconvenience, or a goal. A business provides something valuable that helps address it. The customer receives enough value to justify the purchase, and the business earns enough from the transaction to continue providing the product or service.

Where things get complicated is deciding which end of that equation comes first.

You can begin with something your company wants to sell and then try to persuade people they need it. Or you can begin by understanding something customers need and determining whether your business can provide a useful and profitable solution.

For most small and mid-sized businesses, the second approach provides a much stronger foundation for a customer-focused marketing strategy.

It’s also one of the reasons understanding your customer matters so much. Knowing someone’s age, income, job title, or ZIP code can be useful, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you what they’re struggling with. Good strategy goes deeper and asks what people are trying to accomplish, what gets in their way, and where your business can genuinely help.

Which Business Do You Want to Be In?

Businesses exist because they solve problems for people.

Sometimes those problems are significant. Sometimes they’re wonderfully ordinary.

A restaurant solves the problem of dinner. A bookkeeper solves the problem of keeping financial records organized. A plumber solves a very immediate problem involving water somewhere it shouldn’t be. A retailer may solve the problem of finding the right birthday gift. A software company might eliminate three hours of repetitive work every week.

In each case, the product or service has value because it does something useful for someone.

Too often, businesses reverse that order. They develop the product first and then ask marketing to create the need.

Entrepreneurs are particularly susceptible to this because creating something new is exciting. A new product can be clever, innovative, beautifully designed, and technically impressive—and still sit on the shelf if customers don’t have a compelling reason to buy it.

The same thing happens when businesses chase whatever appears to be selling well somewhere else. By the time everyone notices an opportunity, the market may already be crowded, customer enthusiasm may have changed, or the idea may simply make no sense for your particular audience.

That’s why the strategy should begin a little earlier.

Change the Questions in Your Brainstorming Meeting

Instead of starting your next meeting with, “What can we sell?” try starting with questions like these:

• What challenges are our customers dealing with right now?
• What is a problem our customers have that we can solve for them?
• What is something our customers have to do that we can make easier or simpler?
• What services have customers asked us for that we don’t currently provide?
• What consumes our customers’ time that our knowledge, service, or technology could shorten or eliminate?
• Where do customers regularly become confused, frustrated, delayed, or overwhelmed?
• What are customers already trying to accomplish without us?

See how those questions change the conversation?

They begin with the customer and then consider how the business can help.

That doesn’t mean you should build everything a customer asks for. Some ideas won’t fit your business. Some won’t be profitable. Some require expertise you don’t have or resources you shouldn’t invest. And occasionally customers describe the solution they think they want when what you really need to understand is the problem underneath it.

But those conversations give you a much better starting point.

Listen Before You Decide What the Problem Is

One danger in problem-solving is assuming you already know what the problem is.

Your customers may see it differently.

Listen to the questions people ask before buying. Talk with your sales team about objections they hear repeatedly. Ask customer service what generates the most confusion. Read reviews—not just yours, but reviews of competitors and other businesses in your category. Pay attention to searches on your website, frequently visited pages, abandoned carts, contact-form questions, and conversations happening in person.

There may be patterns hiding in ordinary interactions.

This is similar to the approach we discussed in employee communications: surveys and reports can tell you something, but sometimes the best way to understand what people need is simply to talk with them.

Customers frequently tell businesses where opportunities exist. The trick is listening for the problem behind the request.

Better Marketing Strategy Means Finding the Root Problem

Once you identify a problem, don’t rush immediately toward a solution.

First, make sure you understand the problem.

What appears on the surface may be a symptom of something else. If you solve the symptom rather than the underlying cause, you can spend a lot of money fixing the wrong thing.

This applies to marketing itself.

“We need more website traffic” sounds like a problem. But why?

If the business needs more sales, a lack of traffic might be the issue. Or the existing traffic may be poorly targeted. Or plenty of qualified people may be arriving and leaving because the website doesn’t explain the offer. Or the checkout process may be difficult. Or customers may not trust the business enough to take the next step.

Buying more traffic before answering those questions may simply send more people into the same problem.

That’s why root cause analysis belongs in marketing strategy.

The Swiffer Is a Great Example of Solving a Different Problem

One classic example comes from Procter & Gamble’s development of the Swiffer.

The obvious assumption was that consumers wanted a better way to clean floors, so the natural place to look for improvement was the cleaning product itself.

But observing people clean revealed something more useful. The frustrating part wasn’t necessarily getting the floor clean. Traditional mopping involved filling a bucket, moving it around, handling dirty water, wringing out the mop, and cleaning everything afterward.

The opportunity wasn’t simply a stronger cleaning formula. It was making the entire chore easier.

That change in perspective led to a different kind of floor-cleaning system: a lightweight tool that uses replaceable cleaning material rather than the traditional mop-and-bucket routine.

That’s the difference between asking, “How do we make a better version of what already exists?” and asking, “What is the customer actually trying to accomplish, and what makes that difficult?”

The second question opens considerably more possibilities.

Ask “Why?” Until You Get Beneath the Symptom

One simple method for root cause analysis is the 5 Whys.

The idea is exactly what it sounds like. When you identify a problem, ask why it’s happening. Then ask why that answer is happening. Continue until you’ve moved beyond the first explanation and have a better understanding of what’s underneath it.

For example:

Problem: Online sales are down.

Why? Fewer website visitors are completing purchases.

Why? More people are leaving during checkout.

Why? Shipping costs are appearing late in the process.

Why? Customers don’t know what shipping will cost until they enter their information.

Now the problem looks considerably different from “we need more advertising.”

Instead of immediately spending money to bring more people to the website, you have a specific customer experience to investigate.

This connects directly with e-commerce strategy. Increasing traffic is only one way to grow sales. Sometimes, the better opportunity is removing friction for the customers who are already there.

Map the Process to Find Where Things Break Down

Another useful technique is simply drawing the process.

Start at the beginning and map out what the customer needs to do to achieve the desired outcome.

How does someone discover you? What happens next? Where do they get information? When do they talk with someone? What information do they have to provide? What decisions do they make? Where do they wait? What happens after they buy?

Include the people who actually work in the process when you build the map. Managers may understand how a process is supposed to work, while employees and customers experience how it really works.

Once everything is visible, weak points often become much easier to spot.

Maybe customers have to enter the same information twice. Maybe every quote waits for approval from one person. Maybe the website promises something the sales team has to explain differently. Maybe a handoff between departments regularly causes delays.

Those are business problems, but they’re also marketing problems because customers experience them as part of the brand.

Cause-and-Effect Analysis Can Help With Complicated Problems

For more complex situations, a cause-and-effect diagram—sometimes called a fishbone or Ishikawa diagram—can help teams consider multiple categories of possible causes rather than settling on the first explanation.

Traditional versions often examine categories such as methods, machines, people, environment, measurement, and materials. The exact categories can be adapted to the problem you’re working on.

The value isn’t in drawing the perfect diagram.

The value is forcing the team to consider that a problem may have more than one cause.

Low sales, for example, could stem from the offer, pricing, visibility, customer experience, employee knowledge, competition, market conditions, or several of these factors working together.

“We need more advertising” is much easier to say.

It just isn’t always the answer.

Make Sure the Solution Fits Your Business

Once you understand the customer’s problem, there’s still another question to answer: should your business solve it?

A real customer need doesn’t automatically create a good business opportunity.

You need to consider whether the solution fits your expertise, brand, resources, operations, and financial model. Can you provide it well? Can you price it at a level customers will accept, and the business can sustain? Does it support where the company is going, or does it pull you into something you don’t actually want to become?

This is where strategy keeps a good idea from becoming an expensive distraction.

It’s also why a customer-focused marketing strategy isn’t the same as saying yes to every customer request. You listen carefully, understand the need, evaluate the opportunity, and then make a deliberate decision.

Then Marketing Has a Much Easier Job

When a product or service solves a problem customers genuinely recognize, marketing becomes considerably clearer.

You don’t have to manufacture a complicated reason someone should care.

You can explain the problem, show that you understand it, describe how your solution helps, and give the customer enough information to decide whether it’s right for them.

That clarity carries into your brand messaging as well. When you know the problem you solve and why it matters, it becomes easier to keep your website, advertising, sales conversations, email, and other communications working from the same central idea. That consistency is part of what we discuss in Syncing Up Your Messages: Consistent Brand Messaging.

Marketing shouldn’t have to perform magic on a product nobody asked for.

It works much better when there’s something meaningful to communicate.

Start With the Problem, Then Build the Strategy

Go back to that boardroom where profitability is down.

Instead of writing “What three products can we introduce in 30 days?” on the whiteboard, try something different:

“What has changed for our customers, and where can we create more value for them?”

Maybe the answer is a new product.

Maybe it’s improving an existing service. Maybe customers need a simpler buying process, a different package, better information, faster delivery, more convenient scheduling, or a solution nobody on your team has considered yet.

You won’t know until you understand the problem.

At Paradux Media Group, that’s where we believe good strategy begins. We help businesses step back from the pressure to “do more marketing,” understand what they’re actually trying to accomplish, and build marketing around the people they need to serve.

If your team has plenty of ideas but isn’t sure which problem deserves attention first, contact Paradux Media Group. Sometimes the most valuable part of strategy is asking a better question.