Many B2B industries, and the chemicals industry is a classic case-in-point, do not return enough on their investments, especially in the more mature economies where markets tend to become more “commoditised” and less well differentiated.
These companies create a lot of value for their customers, but fail to capture that value back to their own company’s bottom line. Their customers apply lots of pressure to try to commoditise the offers and companies often succumb to these pressures. This weakness is often down to poor marketing on the part of the companies. We estimate that it loses them at least 10% off their bottom line. Imagine how healthy your business would be with an additional ten percentage points of bottom-line profit.
An intelligent approach to Strategic Marketing can help companies to address this issue. Strategic Marketing is a discipline that brings real customer focus to an organisation and helps them to address the current and future needs of their customers with innovative approaches in products, services, business models and other aspects of creating a differentiated customer experience.
The proof of this can now be studied and read in a new report published this month: “Strategic Marketing in the Chemicals, Plastics and Other B2B Markets.” For instance we discover that there is a strong correlation between higher profit performance and Strategic Marketers having a Marketing or MBA background. We also discover that those companies making more profit are the most regular users of two key tools: Market Value Chain Analysis and PESTLE analysis. Another key finding is that Strategic Marketing is not only about content it is also about the mindset with which you tackle that content. The most successful Strategic Marketers tend to be inquisitive, challenging, open-minded, creative, decisive and disruptive (in a positive way).
A full report of over 120 pages and containing more than 80 charts analysing the findings of the study can be purchased from GEMS Europe GmbH or ECMSA.
