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Your customers don’t want a four inch drill – they want a four inch hole.

Most businesses are only going to survive by not just constantly iterating - which is very important too, but by developing new ideas, which they are going to be bringing to the market. Those businesses that are going to be most successful are those that are drawing ideas to the market. They are not going to be looking inward but are companies that are looking outwards by working with their customers and stakeholders and are building them into their product offerings. It’s a constant virtuous cycle. This has to be done in a disciplined, controlled way and the process has to be managed properly by having a rigorous approach. Understand the problems that you have in the first place is key. As the saying goes - your customers don’t want a four inch drill – they want a four inch hole.

The hard way is to formulate a strategy for entry, a task calling for skills never acquired by most marketers through normal training and experience. Marketers are trained primarily in the use of the 4 P’s: Product, price, place, and promotion

They know how to create a marketing mix that appeals to customers and end users however customers and end users are not always the main problem. But not one but several gates must be opened for a company to reach its goal of selling in these markets. The company must identify each gatekeeper and convert it by applying influence or power.

Moreover, the strategic marketing effort does not end with successful entry into the said market. The company must know how to stay in as well as break in.

Marketing Objective – In a normal marketing situation, a market already exists for a given product category. Consumers understand that category and simply choose among a set of brands and suppliers. A company entering the market will define a target need or customer group, design the appropriate product, set up distribution and establish a marketing communications program. On the other hand, Business Diplomats face the problem of first gaining market access. If the product is quite new they must also be skilled in creating or altering demand. This requires more skill and time than simply meeting demand.

Parties Involved: Marketers routinely deal with several parties: customers, suppliers, distributors, dealers advertising agencies, market research firms and others. Business Diplomacy situations involve even more parties: legislators, government agencies, political parties, public interest groups and unions among others. Each party has an interest in the company’s activity and must be sold on supporting, or at least not blocking, the company. Business Diplomacy is thus a greater multiparty marketing problem than marketing.

Marketing and Business Diplomacy contrasted

Marketing tools. Business Diplomacy involves the normal tools of marketing (the four P’s) plus two others: power and public relations

Power. The business diplomat  must often win the support of influential industry officials, legislators and government bureaucrats to enter and operate in the target market. Thus the business diplomat  needs political skills and a political strategy.
The company must identify the people with the power to open the gate. It must determine the right mix of incentives to offer. Under what circumstances will the gatekeepers acquiesce? Essentially the business diplomat  must have sophisticated lobbying and negotiating skills in order to achieve the desired response from the other party without giving away the house

Public Relations. Where as power is push strategy public relations is a pull strategy. Public opinion takes longer to cultivate, but when energised it can help pull the company into the market

Marketers as Political Strategists

Few marketers are trained in the art of politics and are thus unaccustomed to using power to achieve favourable transactions. Most marketers think that value, not power, wins the marketplace. Companies that find themselves blocked or restricted from a market must undertake a three-step process for creating an entry strategy: mapping the power structure, forging a grand strategy, and developing a tactical implementation plan.
Essentials of Marketing Leadership
Judging by the experience of a wide range of companies with a myriad of marketing issues, there are three essential conditions of marketing leadership – and they are becoming increasingly important:

•    Top management must recognise that the nature of the marketing problem is fundamentally different from the nature of the production problem. This fact has vital implications for a) executive selection, b) marketing strategy, and c) sales organisation. Failure to take the differences into account has got countless companies into serious trouble.

•    Management must recognise the dynamic quality of the marketing problem – all the constant change that is continually occurring not only in the market but also in channels to the market. The change is so continuous and so widespread that it makes every sales plan in the country out of date to some extent. Failure to grasp this point, perhaps more than anything else, has kept companies from getting out of sales trouble when they might otherwise have succeeded.

•    The crying need in marketing management today is for greater conceptual skill – the ability to see the enterprise as a whole and to understand how the various functions of the company and its sales organisation depend on one another.
With our knowledge of the ever changing political landscape, add to that our skill and expertise on business diplomacy, strategy and development, we assist many companies to achieve their goals today and ensure they don’t get left behind tomorrow.