A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

THE OBJECTIVE OF MARKETING ■ 103
bid was the lowest and we had a technological breakthrough which we felt
offered many benefits which were fully explained in the proposal, not a
single win resulted.
The reasons for these results were not hard to uncover. During these
visits, our engineers and scientists traded information <strong>with</strong> the customers.
They found out what the customer wanted and why. If there were aspects
which could affect the customer’s programs we were working on, our people
were able to explain them. If one approach was particularly promising,
but also expensive, that cost could be discussed and justified. Or if it was
more money than the customer was willing to pay, a search could be made
for a more economical route long before bidding started.
In effect, invaluable marketing research was accomplished during these
visits <strong>with</strong> customers, and the secret to winning more contracts was not
lower bids or even more money allocated to our internal research budgets,
but more personal contacts prior to bidding. In this way, we could better
have what the customer wanted in our proposal. However, such visits were
prohibited under government regulations once a Request for Proposal
(RFP) was published by the government. So once the RFP was published,
these contacts could not be made. The bottom line was that pre-proposal
marketing was essential, and <strong>Drucker</strong>’s theory was confirmed for these bids.
<strong>Drucker</strong> Thought Marketing and Selling Were Adversarial
Like many of <strong>Drucker</strong>’s concepts, one had to think about them deeply
to understand them fully and apply them correctly. In the opening to his
lecture, <strong>Drucker</strong> had stated that marketing and selling were neither complementary
nor supplementary and were almost opposites. This idea is
certainly counterintuitive. Even today, most marketing theorists envision
selling as a subset of marketing. Currently accepted marketing theory
goes something like this:
Corporate Strategy. At the top sits corporate strategy. Marketing strategy
is one level down and must support the strategy decided on by the
corporation.
Market Positioning Strategy. One discrete marketing strategy is positioning.
This means emphasizing where your product is relative to competitive
products in the mind of the buyer. Jaguar, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz,
BMW, and many other automobile manufacturers all sell sports cars.