· Slumber

· Expansion & Awareness

· Learning & Understanding

· Freedom

Slumber

You start your marketing evolutionary process by responding automatically to situations and events, based on your conditioning about marketing to date. Your understanding of marketing is based on generalisations, and social conditioning. You do what you think you should be doing, and what is deemed acceptable and the "thing to do" by others.

The more diagnosis you do, by way of a marketing audit, the more you will begin to question whether what you (and everyone else for that matter) have been doing, are the correct tactics. More importantly, this aspect of your marketing is nearly always down to the unwillingness to accept responsbility and test new marketing approaches. An aversion to risk, to be unpopular,, face criticism, or to stick your head above the parapets, can all prevent you from waking up from your slumber of non performance and lack of results.

Quite often people in this phase of the marketing evolutionay process don't understand why they think the way they do, or why they hold the opinions or views they do about marketing. Many are too busy responding to the symptoms of poor, bad or selfish marketing to awaken to the recognition or realisation as to why they're not generating the results they want.

Quite often, at this stage, people aren't doing any marketing planning at all !

Many also tend to criticise and lash out at others that are "different", or who appear to be proactiely going about the promotion of their own wares, and will go to great lengths to justify their opinions and their own "values".

If you're at this state of your marketing evolutionary process, then perhaps its time, to wake up, take contol, and stop following the herd. Just because everyone else are performing certain marketing activities or sticking to a particular modus operandi, doesn't make it correct, or right for you.

Expansion & Awareness

Explanations, Realisations, and the ability to look for and interpret the "signs" are all parts of recognising you are in this stage of the marketing evolutionary process. You may also be able to identify certain Key Performance Indicators to help you accept your position and to recognise the current trends and what your corrective actions need to be...

You need to recognise and become aware as to which indicators are showing an INCREASE, for example - Cost of sales, Cost of leads, Stress levels, Labour turnover, Cost of advertising, all indicators that can help raise your awareness of your true marketing position and help to determine a future possible course of action for your marketing.

You also need to recognise and become aware as to which indiciators are showing a DECLINE, for example - Sales, Turnover, Market Share, Profit, Share Price, Margin%, Response to advertising are all indicators that can also help raise your awareness of your true marketing position and help to determine a future possible course of action for your marketing.

By creating and being able to read the signs or indicators all help to faciliate your awareness, and recognise its time to come out of your slumber and modus operandi of automatism and following the crowd.

Many people can take years to recognise that they need to become aware of their true situation, and once again a marketing audit can help initiate this part of the process, and can save months, even years of effort and thousands of pounds of missed revenue opportunities.

Learning & Understanding

this occurs when you become aware of the signs, and can identify the reasons WHY you have been in your auto-pilot slumber, and WHY you've been experiencing the lack of progress and results you so desperately want.

You very quickly begin to find the "real" reasons for your lack of progress and what you need to do to address them.

Again, a marketing audit can really help you in your evolutionary process, as can discussing your "situation" with a marketing coach.

You need to understand WHY you do what you do, and understand what it is you OFFER, and to whom. You need to understand the myths that all your false assumptions have created and why you've limited yourself the way you have.

When you reach an appropriate level of "understanding", you will recognise that the results you are experiencing now are the cumulative total of the work or lack of it before now. There are still areas of your marketing aren't working, not performing as well as they should be, but you understand what they are, and more importantly what needs to be done.

The more you become aware and understand your current situation and how you've arrived at it, the less likely you will return to behaving or responding in auto pilot. In other words, having completed your marketing audit and now understand why your marketing isnt working it will all seem obvious as to what needs to be done, and you will kick yourself as to why you hadn't done it before now.

Freedom

When you KNOW something - it is more than just a basic understanding of the mere mechanics of cause and effect. Knowing comes from not just understanding by reading a book, or ebook or by attending a workshop, seminar or teleconference.

Knowing means having applied what you've learned having completed the previous 3 stages of the process, and come to the realisation having assimilated and "considered" the feedback from the indicators and signs around you.

When you Know what needs to be done as part of the next stage of the development of your marketing, you feel alive. You have a sense of purpose, and want to create a plan of action. You know your former reactionary processes, and want to correct them. You know what needs to be done, and you know how it needs to be done and why.

You begin to "know" things in small chunks, but by stepping back you begin to see patterns emerging and you begin to see all the parts of the problem and the "solution" and what to do next.

"Knowing" also means knowing the truth about who you are, what you want, and whom you can really help. It means becoming better centred, better grounded, and having a better feeling of what's "right". Many people have a fear of failure, or a fear of success, or a fear of a whole wide range of issues, so they don't want to become aware of what they could do, or understand how they can achieve it, they stay the same, they don't grow, and they don't achieve their full potential.

If you complete all 4 stages of your marketing evolutionary process, then be mentally prepared for an almost overnight transformation in who you are, what you offer, and what you really want to (and will) achieve.

Hope it helps.

;)

Fraser