How Mid-Sized Companies Outsmart Giants: Learning from Tech and CPG Success Stories

Posted on April 4, 2025April 16, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

We often assume that industry giants, with their massive budgets and extensive resources, hold all the cards.

However, some of the most remarkable success stories of the past decade prove that mid-sized companies can outsmart these giants.

Having spent years in global leadership roles at Fortune 500 companies, I’ve witnessed firsthand how mid-sized companies can successfully challenge and even overtake industry leaders.

Let’s examine several compelling examples from both technology and consumer packaged goods (CPG) sectors to understand the winning strategies that make this possible.

If you would rather listen than read:

The Technology Sector: Speed and Innovation as Weapons

Stripe: Simplifying the Complex
When Patrick and John Collison founded Stripe in 2010, the payment processing industry was dominated by established players like PayPal and traditional banks.

Rather than trying to match their vast resources, Stripe focused on solving a specific pain point: making it incredibly easy for developers to implement payment processing.

As co-founder John Collison noted,

We’re building tools that help ambitious companies scale faster. Our success is tied to their success.

This philosophy drove their key strategies:
– Focused on developer experience when larger competitors were prioritizing enterprise sales
– Created an API that could be implemented in minutes rather than weeks
– Maintained agile product development, launching new features in weeks instead of months
– Built a developer-friendly documentation system that became industry standard

Their results were remarkable:
– Reached $95 billion valuation by 2021
– Processed $640 billion in payments in 2021 (up 60% from 2020)
– Serves 90% of enterprise companies that started since 2011
– Maintains a 98% customer satisfaction rate
– Achieved this with a team 1/10th the size of traditional payment processors and a customer base including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

Zoom: Winning Through Simplicity
Before the pandemic, Zoom was competing against tech giants Microsoft, Cisco, and Google in video conferencing. Instead of trying to match their feature sets, Zoom focused obsessively on doing one thing exceptionally well.

Their winning approach:
– Prioritized call quality and reliability over feature abundance
– Created an interface so simple that even non-tech-savvy users could master it
– Built their product based on direct user feedback rather than competitor analysis
– Maintained focus on core functionality while competitors tried to be all things to all users

The results were staggering: from 10 million daily meeting participants in 2019 to 300 million in 2020, maintaining significant market share even after the pandemic peak.

Shopify: Democratizing E-commerce
While Amazon was building the world’s largest retail infrastructure, Shopify took a different approach to e-commerce. Instead of competing directly, they empowered small and medium-sized businesses to compete in the digital space.

Their strategic choices:
– Created a platform that leveraged existing resources rather than building expensive infrastructure
– Focused on making enterprise-level capabilities accessible to smaller businesses
– Built an ecosystem of developers and partners to extend platform capabilities
– Maintained focus on merchant success rather than direct consumer relationships

Today, Shopify powers over 2 million … Click to continue reading

Insight, Innovation and Inclusive Leadership: The New Business Success Formula

Posted on February 8, 2025March 2, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-dunn

Organisations are facing unprecedented challenges in remaining competitive and maintaining business success in 2025.

The three fundamental pillars of sustained success are deep customer insights, meaningful innovation, and inclusive leadership.

Let’s explore why this powerful trinity is more relevant than ever in 2025 and how you can leverage it to grow your business.

Prefer to listen to the podcast? Click below.

Why These Three Pillars Matter Now More Than Ever

The numbers tell a compelling story.

McKinsey’s latest research reveals that companies effectively combining these three elements outperform their peers by an astounding 85% in sales growth and more than 25% in gross margin. But what makes this combination so powerful?

Deep Customer Insights Power Business Success

Insight is the cornerstone of every successful strategy.

The key difference between successful and struggling companies? Top performers turn data into actionable intelligence that drives decision-making at all levels.

McKinsey reports that companies using customer insights for decision-making are 60% more likely to achieve above-market growth rates!

The true value of insights comes when they bridge the gap between raw data and real-world application, allowing businesses to anticipate consumer needs, optimize operations, and refine strategies.

Gone are the days when gut feelings drove business decisions. Modern market leaders demonstrate the transformative power of customer insights:

– One standout example is Spotify’s “Wrapped” campaign. In 2023, Spotify used not just user listening data but an understanding of the emotional drivers behind their customers’ listening habits—self-reflection and social sharing. By tapping into this human desire, Spotify’s campaign led to over 30 billion streams, showcasing the power of customer insights in driving engagement and brand loyalty.

– Nike’s adaptive clothing line, developed through extensive consultation with disabled athletes, opened entirely new market segments

– P&G’s open innovation platform has revolutionized their product development process by incorporating external perspectives

But it’s not just consumer-facing data that drives success.

Internal business insights—such as employee feedback, operational inefficiencies, and market trends—are equally crucial.

Companies that develop a culture of continuous insight-gathering and sharing can make smarter, more informed decisions at all levels.

Does your Insight Development Process need an upgrade? Click below and check out our two-hour online masterclass for marketers and market researchers.

Innovation: The Competitive Edge Amplifier of Business Success

Recent PwC research shows that 61% of CEOs view innovation as their top priority for achieving long-term growth.

But here’s what’s fascinating: successful innovation in 2025 looks vastly different from what we’ve seen before.

Innovation is not just about creating groundbreaking products or services; it’s about creating solutions that drive long-term value.

BCG’s latest report revealed that top innovators share three core practices:

Maintaining investment in innovation even during downturns
Leveraging advanced technologies like AI to drive innovation
Aligning innovation with sustainability goals alongside profitability

Microsoft offers a powerful example of how innovation can drive meaningful change. Instead of treating AI as a standalone technology, Microsoft integrated AI tools into their product suite to enhance real user productivity.

The result? A 40% increase in … Click to continue reading

Successful Brand Building for SMEs: Overcoming Your 10 Biggest Frustrations

Posted on May 28, 2024March 28, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Brand building for SMEs is a complex journey. As an SME owner, CEO, or CMO, you may often be overwhelmed by the challenges of establishing and maintaining a strong brand presence.

In this article, we’ll explore ten common frustrations of brand building for SME leaders and provide solutions and inspiring real-world examples of overcoming them.
If you prefer to listen rather than read:

Marketing Deep Dives by Denyse · SME Brand Building – Overcoming 10 Key Challenges

1. Inconsistent Brand Messaging

Consistency is key to building a strong brand for every company, but achieving it can be a significant hurdle. Inconsistent messaging across various channels can dilute your brand’s identity and confuse your audience. This inconsistency often stems from a lack of clear guidelines and miscommunication among team members. Unfortunately, these are common problems for brand building in SMEs.

Solution: Develop comprehensive brand guidelines that detail your brand’s voice, tone, visual style, and key messages. Ensure that all team members, from marketing to customer service, are trained and aligned with these guidelines. Regularly audit your content across different platforms to help maintain consistency and make necessary adjustments when needed.

Example: Beardbrand, an SME focused on beard grooming products, maintains consistent brand messaging through detailed brand guidelines and a strong, unified voice across all platforms. Their commitment to consistency has helped them build a loyal customer base and grow their brand significantly.

2. Limited Marketing Budget

Many SMEs operate with tight budgets, making allocating sufficient funds for branding activities a real challenge. This financial constraint can hinder your ability to invest in high-quality content, advertising, and innovative marketing strategies.

Solution: Focus on cost-effective branding strategies that provide high returns. Leverage social media platforms, which offer affordable advertising options and can help you reach a broader audience. Collaborate with influencers and use content marketing to share valuable information that establishes your brand authority. Remember, creativity often trumps budget when it comes to effective branding.

Example: Hiut Denim Co., a small UK-based jeans manufacturer, used storytelling and social media to build its brand without a large marketing budget. By focusing on the quality of its product and the story behind its brand, it attracted a dedicated following and increased its sales.

3. Difficulty Measuring ROI on Branding Initiatives

Conclusion

Brand building for SMEs and larger companies is an ongoing process that involves overcoming various challenges. Addressing these frustrations head-on can significantly enhance your brand’s presence and impact as an SME owner, CEO, or CMO. By implementing the solutions outlined above, you can navigate the complexities of brand building more effectively and set your business on a path to sustained success.

If you are looking for expert guidance to overcome these challenges and elevate your brand, consider partnering with a consultancy specialising in SME branding strategies. With the right support, you can confidently transform your frustrations into opportunities and achieve your branding goals.

For more insights and personalized assistance, visit C3Centricity and discover how we can help you build a strong, cohesive,

… Click to continue reading

Packaging: Are You Using This Free Channel For Communicating With Your Customers?

Posted on August 7, 2022March 11, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Do you consider your packaging to be a part of the product, protecting its contents and framing its on-shelf life? Or do you consider it to be an integral part of your connection with your customers at an important moment of truth, that of purchase and usage? Or both of these?

If you answered both, then I believe that you are making maximum use of your packaging or at least you recognise its potential for communicating.

If you answered only one of the choices, then you may be missing an important opportunity. Let me explain, with a few examples.

People don’t read instructions

We all expect most things that we use or consume to be intuitive these days. In other words, we assume that we will understand how to build / cook / use them without reading the manual / instructions.

If you are like most people – myself included – this has nothing to do with the complexity of the product concerned. I myself will only turn to the instructions when something doesn’t work: I end up with left-over screws when mounting a flat-pack piece of furniture, or I can’t achieve multi-recordings on my smart TV or cable box.

In the article How Likely Are You to Read the Instructions they link behaviour to personality types. It makes an interesting read and offers at least some explanations as to why many (most?) of us still don’t read instructions.

Since the internet arrived, we have access to more and more information, and yet we seem to be reading less and less. Therefore as marketers, we need to ensure that any vital information we want to share, is clearly highlighted on the pack.

People do look at packs

Whether it is the cream we put on our faces, the cereal we eat for breakfast, or the dip that we offer to friends on match night, there are moments when we are faced with packaging for more than a split second. It is at these times that we are likely to read at least some of what is written on the pack.

It therefore makes sense to provide more than just a list of ingredients. After all you have your customer’s attention, so make use of it to impress or educate.

Here are a few of the best examples I have come across:

Nestlé does a great job of providing useful information on their pack,s with their “nutritional compass.” This includes four different pieces of information: good to know, good to remember, good question and the nutritional data.

What I particularly like about what Nestle has done, is to combine mandatory information on nutritional values, with useful information for the consumer. Although they may not be the most consumer centric company around, at least they did think consumer first in the development of their “compass.”

Juvena of Switzerland: The short message to “Enjoy the smoothness” on the back of the Juvena hand cream sample tube, makes the experience both … Click to continue reading

The Exciting Future of Brand Building comes from Customer Centricity

Posted on April 5, 2022March 11, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Marketing is an old profession. It’s been around for hundreds of years in one form or another. But with the advent of digital in the early 80’s, companies began taking a serious look at their marketing strategies.

Many organisations realised that it was time for a major overhaul of their primarily outbound strategies. Consumers no longer appreciated being interrupted in their daily lives, if they ever did! Marketing had to find ways to stimulate more inbound engagements, but how?

However, after trying multiple inbound marketing strategies, they find that they are still irritating their customers with spammy emails, intrusive pop-ups and over-complicated cookies, that gather far more information than most organisations will ever need or use. At least those will soon be a thing of the past!

Despite these changes, CMOs remain one of the leading c-suite members who struggle to keep their jobs for more than four or five years. The reasons are many, but the post “Head of Marketing, How Can You Keep Your Job When Most CMOs Are Losing Theirs?” explains what you can do to ensure that you leave your position when you want to and not on your CEO’s terms.

Brand Building

Many large CPG companies, such as P&G, Coca-Cola and Nestle, have changed the name of their Marketing departments in the past twenty years, to Brand Building. They hoped that it would revive sales and give new vitality to their communications to better engage their customers in the new social world. But most failed miserably, because they remained very much in a state of business as usual. They continued with the same processes and mind-sets. And with few exceptions, they prioritised thoughts about themselves and their brands, and rarely took their customers’ perspective.

A more recent change is bringing more marketing tasks in-house, as P&G has done. Read more here. While this certainly saves a considerable part of their budget, the biggest advantage from my perspective, is that these companies automatically learn more about their customers’ behaviour. When you are planning communication campaigns and deciding on ad spend, you need to understand where your customers are and when they are most open to receiving your messages. That for me is far more valuable than any savings on agency costs. What do you think?

Even without making such a drastic move, many other consumer goods companies have realised that to satisfy the consumer they had to do things differently. They were the ones that moved to customer centricity. Or to be exact they started on their journey towards putting the customer at the heart of their businesses. Customer centricity is not a destination, because consumers are constantly changing and their satisfaction never lasts for long. It is a journey where you are accompanying your customers with the aim to satisfy and delight them, however they change.

One of the issues that has been created by marketing is that I believe we have taught our customers far too well! They understand a lot more about … Click to continue reading

5 Rules for Rolling Out a Successful Local Brand into Global Markets

Posted on March 24, 2022March 11, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

I remember reading an article in the Financial Times a few years ago, that challenged companies to search for a new style of marketer.

Now you might be forgiven for thinking that they were speaking about the current need for marketers to be both creative and tech-savvy. But they weren’t. They were referring to the growing demand for marketers who could take successful local brands to global fortune.

After all, thanks to the internet, we live in a global market and the recent pandemic has highlighted this more than ever before, with online shopping booming. The marketer who understands when local specificities make sense and when they don’t, is the one who will succeed in today’s global economy.

In this networked world, more and more successful local brands are attempting global roll-outs. What does it take to repeat the success you’ve had at market level when you launch globally? Here are my five rules to fortune:

1. Understand the Market and How It’s Changing

This is the basis of any new product launch and applies just as well to global rollouts as it does to local brand developments. Today’s customers are demanding, so find out as much as possible about them. Understand their rational needs but also their emotional desires, even if they don’t openly articulate them.

For global rollouts, additional information is required, including a comparison of the similarities and differences between the customers in the local and future markets. This is where trend following is of particular use, even if you haven’t (yet?) developed plausible future scenarios, as I recommend here.

Let’s look at some of the latest trends which are growing across regions today.

Conscious consumerism: Consumers have become much more thoughtful about what and where they purchase. They support companies that demonstrate the same values that they have and brands are tapping into this trend with campaigns showing their position on various topics. Check out these examples of latest campaigns:
I want it now! Consumers and shoppers want information – and their purchases too! – where and when they need it. This has been the case for years. But now they expect to get near-instantaneous answers to all their questions, sometimes using visual search to identify and buy whatever they see, wherever they see it. Ikea’s Place App offers shoppers the possibility to snap an article they like and then see it in their home environment. Ikea also offers a visual search function for shoppers to identify an item seen in a magazine or real life, and then find similar ones. Dulux’s Paint Colour Visualizer offers shoppers a similar service; you can try out paint colours virtually in your home to see how it will look with your furnishings before you purchase it.
Personalised Experiences. Despite the desire for data privacy control, consumers are ready to provide their information in exchange for a better, highly personalised experience. ZozoSuit is one example

… Click to continue reading

The Risks of Not Knowing All 12 Essential Elements of Your Target Customer

Posted on February 8, 2022March 10, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

I think it’s pretty clear to everyone in business that NOT knowing your target customer costs a lot – sometimes the business itself! (Think Kodak, Nokia, Borders)

So let me ask you this; how well do you really know your own target customers? Are they men, women, younger, older, Fortune 100 companies, local businesses? If you can at least answer that, then you have the basics, but how much more should you know about them?

Well I can help you there, with these 12 essential elements of a customer persona or avatar.

Background

I was recently working with a local service provider that was looking to improve their online presence. They were keen to have more impact on social media and had asked for advice about the best platforms, optimal frequency of publishing and possible content ideas.

They are a new client for me, so I think they were a little surprised when I didn’t get straight into the “sexy” topic of social media. Instead, I started by taking them through the basics of target customer identification. Lucky for them that I did!

When we had finished the exercise, we had actually found five different targets for them to address, rather than just the two they had been addressing until now. This clearly would have an impact on both where, what and how they communicated online.

It is for this reason that I always recommend that every brand and business completes a target persona and regularly updates it every time they learn something new about their customers. I also encourage you to keep it handy, ideally always visible on or around your desk. That way you will always be thinking customer first whenever you are working on a new project.

So let’s imagine that we’re having our first meeting together and I’m asking a few (well 12 actually!) questions about your customers. How many can you immediately answer?

The 12 Essential Elements of a Target Customer Persona

C3Centricity has designed a simple template that helps clients have all the essential information about their customers in one place, summarised on one page. It’s called the 4W™ Persona Template; if you haven’t already done so, you can download it, together with a detailed workbook explaining exactly how to complete it. Just click on the image below.

I would highly recommend you download it right now, before continuing to read, so that you can follow along with the one-pager in front of you.

Here are the 12 essential elements you need to have at hand in order to complete the template:

1. WHO – DEMOGRAPHICS: This is usually a “no-brainer” and is how most organisations describe their customers. However it’s not really original and definitely not competitive, although they are an essential foundation.

But there is so much more you should and absolutely must know about your customers, so read on.

2. WHAT THEY USE: Whether you are offering a product or providing a service, you … Click to continue reading

13 Most Inspiring Marketing Quotes and Questions to Live By in 2022

Posted on January 18, 2022March 11, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Did you know that using marketing quotes can improve your plans? Do you have a plan you are following that will (hopefully) enable you to reach your goals?

To meet our objectives, we often look to make changes, large or small, in our organisation. At times like these, I find it useful to motivate with inspiring marketing quotes from people much wiser than I am. If you are looking for ways to motivate and inspire your team, then I am sure you will enjoy these.

This is my selection of great quotes from some of the best marketers around, together with a relevant question to ask yourself for each. If your favourite quote is not included, then please add it to the comments below the post.

**#1. “Strategy and timing are the Himalayas of marketing. Everything else is the Catskills” Al Ries**

This quote refers to the Catskills, a province of the Appalachian Mountains, located in southeastern New York and only 1270m high. It compares them to the Himalayas, a range that includes some of the world’s highest peaks, including Mount Everest (8,849m).

It uses this comparison to suggest that to succeed in marketing you have to afront the highest peaks of strategy and timing, and not be satisfied with scaling simple hills. In other words, be in the right place at the right time with the right offer. Simple!

QUESTION: Are you going to upgrade your marketing this year to meet this lofty challenge?

**#2. “In marketing I’ve seen only one strategy that can’t miss – and that is to market to your best customers first, your best prospects second and the rest of the world last” John Romero**

I love this quote because it refers to knowing and understanding your customers. The best ones, however you define that, come first and your best prospects come second. If you’d like to know if you’re targeting your very best customers and best prospects, then check out the following post: How Well Do you Know Your Customers? 13 Questions your Boss Expects you to Answer

QUESTION: Do you know who your best customers are and everything you should about them?

**#3. “Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation” Milan Kundera**

This post shows the often forgotten importance of marketing to business. I know those of you in sales or operations etc will complain, but if customers don’t know and love your brands then you don’t have a business. It really is as simple as that. I also like that innovation is included, because especially today, customers have become so demanding that we need to constantly upgrade our offers to them.

QUESTION: Does your business value marketing? If not, how can you help them to recognise its value?

**#4. “The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions” Claude Levi-Strauss**

Are you better at asking questions or answering them? Which is more important in your job? Why? A leader doesn’t have all … Click to continue reading

Should CMOs Concentrate on Brand Building or Business Growth?

Posted on May 27, 2021March 11, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Which is more important, brand building or business growth?

Do you remember when Coca-Cola did away with their CMO in favour of a Chief Growth Officer? Then two years later they brought back the position. At the time, I asked if they were wise or foolhardy to make such a change, but they answered the question themselves!

In an interview with Marketing Week, their global vice president of creative claimed that it had “broadened” the company’s approach to marketing. Obviously, this didn’t live up to their optimistic expectations. I think that other companies who followed suit, also realised that they need a CMO after all. However, their role has changed significantly.

HOW MARKETING HAS CHANGED

Marketing is an old profession. It’s been around for hundreds of years in one form or another. If you’re like me and are fascinated by how change happens, then I’m sure this complete history of marketing Infographic by Hubspot will be of interest.

With the arrival of digital marketing in the early 80’s, many companies began to take a serious look at their marketing. They realised that their primarily outbound strategy had to change. Their consumers didn’t appreciate being interrupted in their daily lives. However, with the creation of inbound marketing, they still irritated their consumers with spammy emails, popups and “subtle” cookies for following their every move. No wonder the EU felt inclined to develop its GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).

What has changed over the past five years is marketing’s deeper awareness of, if not complete adherence to, what customers like and dislike. The major trends that we have seen and their impact on marketing, include:

Chatbots, especially through Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, to catch consumers on the go with highly personalised messaging.
The use of voice. With the battle between Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the voice search and commands domain, customers can get answers just by asking. This is a huge challenge for businesses because being on the first page of search results is no longer enough; you have to be first!
Video is taking over social media, with its rapid rise on YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter and Facebook.
Influencer marketing is giving way to customer journey mapping with the increased detail that IoT can provide. Many organisations have moved their marketing plans to mirror their customers’ path to purchase. Or rather paths, as personalisation continues to trump mass engagement.
Zero-party data. As social media platforms have seriously reduced the collection of their subscribers’ data, brands are increasing their direct engagements with their consumers. Through polls, quizzes and competitions, they openly ask for consumers’ details, bypassing the need for cookies.

Have you taken these megatrends on board and adapted your marketing accordingly? If not, why not?

BRAND BUILDING

In the past decade or so, many large CPG companies such as P&G and Nestle renamed their Marketing departments as Brand Builders, in the hope of adapting to this new world. They failed, miserably.

I believe the reason they failed … Click to continue reading

The 7 Keys to Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Posted on October 8, 2020March 11, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Ever wonder how to get more people talking about your business? It’s simple.

Offer them incredible products and services that solve their problems and fulfil their needs and desires. Then when you have converted them into customers, continue to keep them satisfied and give them something to talk about by surprising them too.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But as you know it’s not. I realise that only too well in my own service offerings. Which is why I decided to write this article about the 7 key elements that will get people talking about us!

Every strategy comes with its own set of rules, and the same is true for word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM). Yes, this means that you can actually create a strategy to generate positive word-of-mouth for your business. In fact, this has become an essential part of marketing as people have started to lose trust in the reviews they read online – more on that later. Friends, family and trusted advisors are those they turn to for a valued opinion these days.

But first: why does Word-of-Mouth matter?

To start with, it is important to understand what cognitive dissonance is. According to Wikipedia’s definition, it occurs when

“a person holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values; or participates in an action that goes against one of these three, and experiences psychological stress because of that. Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to sit with those seemingly opposite things that all seem true.”

In other words, people are always searching for ways to reduce their stress that is caused by cognitive dissonance when shopping and selecting brands. One of the ways they do this is by searching for confirmation that they have made the right choices. Receiving positive word-of-mouth opinions of products and services from friends or family members will reduce the dissonance, as it confirms people’s beliefs in what they have purchased.

Given that consumers need input to reduce the risks they take, especially when purchasing a brand for the first time, it is marketing’s job to provide a maximum amount of information to build trust. Whether this is through advertising or online customer reviews, it is important to show both transparency and popularity to enhance confidence.

This has become a challenge in recent years as a result of the exposure of significant fake reviews on many websites, including Amazon. There are now even services to highlight these paid or fake reviews, such as fakespot.com and reviewmeta.com. If you are interested in this topic, then I suggest the article on “10 secrets to uncovering which online reviews are fake.” by Catey Hill.

So how can we improve customers’ trust in what we offer? Here are seven ideas I came up with to include in your word-of-mouth marketing:

#1 Make Customers Delighted!

If you value your customers, offer them more than they expect! It’s not only the great product or service that generates loyalty … Click to continue reading

Are You Still Using The Marketing 5Ps? Move To The Improved 7Qs.

Posted on March 19, 2020March 11, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Denyse Drummond-Dunn · Are You Still Using The Marketing 5Ps? Move To The Improved 7Qs.

“Never miss an episode. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to get new episodes as they become available.”

Marketing is a great profession and the marketing 5Ps is the code by which we live. I’ve worked in or with marketing teams for almost my whole career and I am passionate about brand building.

From the outside, others see marketers as those who come to work late and seem to party all night. They always seem to be watching TV or jetting off to exotic places to talk about advertising!

For people working in operations or finance, marketers just don’t seem to be doing a very serious job; they’re always having too much fun! I’m sure you’ve already heard such comments.

Well, as you yourself know, marketing IS fun, but it’s also a lot of hard work, often close to 24/7 on some occasions.

So does all that hard work pay off? Not often enough in my opinion. And why? Because marketers simply don’t always ask the right questions!

The 5 Questions Marketers Should Ask

If you work in marketing, you already know the 5Ps – people, place, product, price and promotion. However, the problem with those is that when you find an issue with one of them, you know the “what” but not the “how”.

So I suggest you work with my 7Qs instead. Each of my seven questions explain not only what to check, but also the how and why you need to examine the area.

And if you can’t immediately answer more than just a couple of them, then perhaps you need to do a little more work and a little less partying!

Q1. Who are your customers?

The first “P” stands for people and often this is taken to be “Do you know to whom you are selling?” The answer is always yes and that’s accepted as sufficient.

Instead, ask yourself who your customers really are. I don’t mean just their demographics, but what, where and how they use or consume your brand and the category in which you are competing. And especially the why of their attitudes and behaviours. If you can’t give all these details about your customers, then you’re in serious trouble.

For more on this topic, see “12 things you need to know about your target customers” for details on better defining your customer persona. You will also find a link in the article to download a useful template you can use to store all your information as you gather it.

Q2. How are your customers changing?

Hopefully, you answered Q1 without any hesitation – you did, didn’t you? Did you also download our template and complete it? Many of my clients find it a useful way to store and rapidly access the information whenever they need it.

It’s great that you know a lot about your customers, but people change. Are you following how your customers … Click to continue reading

How the Best Marketers are Getting More Actionable Insights

Posted on October 17, 2019March 10, 2025 by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Marketing often jumps from information to insight, to the frustration of market research. But the best marketers know that closer collaboration and sharing enables greater underst anding and deeper insights.… Click to continue reading

We often assume that industry giants, with their massive budgets and extensive resources, hold all the cards.