One of the most common challenges for my JPMA CEO Mentor Program clients is how to market their product(s) to consumers. How much should they spend to stimulate consumer demand? Should they advertise? What’s the role of PR? How effective is social media marketing? And, of course, this is all complicated by the fact that no company, small or large, has extra piles of money lying around waiting for a place to be spent.

As anyone who has read my previous writings or worked with me will recognize, I recommend that CEO’s adopt the mindset of having a business model that is a perpetual “work in progress” that you are continuously improving. Marketing should be looked at as one cog in the business model wheel. Based on my own experience and what I observe in the marketplace today, here’s a sequence of questions that could lead you down the right marketing path for your company. And, as you will see, I don’t necessarily think that conventional advertising and PR need to be a priority for most JP companies. Let’s start with the basics.

1.      Do your products really, truly have a competitive advantage at the price you are charging? No amount of marketing is going to make a weak product successful. If your products aren’t up to snuff, fix that first before wasting resources on building demand. In today’s world of easy access to product quality and price comparison information, you can’t fake it. And, be honest with yourself. It’s very easy to fall in love with your own creations even when competitive products are objectively superior.

2.      How and where do your consumer customers make their buying decision? Whether the product is a self-purchase or a registry/gift item, it’s probably accurate to say that the mom is the decision-maker. But, how does she make her decision regarding your product(s)? If you don’t have a handle on this (and aren’t periodically checking to see if things are changed), you’ll be possibly wasting a lot of marketing dollars.

For some categories like nursing, car seats, or monitors, moms often most trust recommendations from friends with babies or reviews from resources like Baby Bargains or Amazon.com. For cribs and other furniture, in-store personnel might be a big influence. For products like rattles and teethers, the purchase decision may well be made by moms without much outside input and not until standing in front of the display. Whatever your consumer’s buying process is, it should determine where you concentrate your communication efforts.

3.      How much of your resources can you afford to spend on marketing? I don’t believe in marketing on faith. Every company ultimately has to live within its means. And every dollar you spend needs to provide a return on the investment. So, when it comes to establishing a marketing budget, you need to look at the cost and benefit sides together. The questions are, (a) specifically what measurable things are you trying to accomplish in what time frame, (b) how much will it cost, and (c) does that make financial sense? Beware of marketing agencies that say, tell me how much you want to spend and we’ll spend it. Instead, they should be asking what outcomes you are looking for, telling you how much it will cost to achieve those outcomes, and holding themselves accountable for achieving them.

4.      What’s the most cost-effective marketing process for you? Once you’ve made sure your products are in fact superior to a sufficient segment of the market, you understand how consumers decide whether or not to buy your stuff, and you know what marketing needles you are trying to move and how much you can afford to spend to move them, you’re ready to design (or redesign) the marketing process portion of your business model. Given the importance of word-of-mouth in the juvenile marketplace, one of the first and most cost-effective opportunities you might want to look at is leveraging your existing consumer customers—as few or as many of them as you may have. They could easily become your “consumer sales force”.

One of the best marketing programs we ever created at The First Years was what we called the “Parents’ Council”. It started in the early 70’s as just a periodic gathering of moms who used our products and lived near our headquarters. Eventually it expanded via the internet to include many thousands of parents (mostly moms) nationwide. To this day, I run into people who tell me they were proud members of the Council and really appreciated the way we interacted with members. If I were doing it all again, I would be even more aggressive in trying to get everyone who bought one of our products to join the Council and even more diligent about making sure every member became a raving fan and enthusiastic spokesperson for our brand.

The way you can fuel the word-of mouth engine is first by having great products, but then by establishing ongoing positive relationships with the people who buy and like your products. If you’re nice to them, they’ll have positive things to say about your brand and the ball will start rolling. You can sign up people via inserts in packages, on your web site, or via social media. Once they’re on board, maintain an ongoing mutually beneficial dialogue. Help them with their issues, provide member benefits and purchase incentives, provide member-only information, ask their opinions, get reactions to new designs, make them realize you care. And, if you sell multiple infant/toddler products as we did, you can bring your other products to your customers’ attention on an age-appropriate timed-release basis. Finally, (see question #3) you can track effectiveness by seeing how many new members of your “club” were influenced to buy your products by existing or past club members.

Hopefully, this gives you some new things to think about when it comes to spreading the word. Don’t be afraid to try new marketing approaches compatible with the rest of your business model and institutionalize what works.  

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