Marketing guru, Philip Kotler, outlines the 10 marketing sins that you, as a marketer, can commit:

* Your company is not sufficiently market focused and customer driven.
* Your company does not fully understand its target customers.
* Your company needs to better define and monitor its competitors.
* Your company has not properly managed its relationships with stakeholders.
* Your company is not good at finding new opportunities.
* Your company has a deficient marketing planning process.
* Your company needs to tighten product and service policies.
* Your company’s brand-building and communication skills are weak.
* Your company is not well organized to carry on effective and efficient marketing.
* Your company has not made maximum use of technology.

On the first deadly sin – an insufficient market focus – Kotler argues that many companies incorrectly identify their market as “everyone” or make a vague statement as “women between ages 20 and 50.” Instead, a company should customize its customer by identifying different market segments and preparing offerings for each chosen segment. In addition, the company should identify the more important segments, assign managers to them, and award those managers accordingly.

Another major error by companies is to assume that only the marketing and sales departments serve the customer. Kotler says every employee – perhaps through a companywide training program – should understand his or her connection to the customer.

He feels that companies should bring the customer at the centre of its universe. Also, apart from training every employee on his/her connection with the customer, the company should also look at the following:

* Develop a clear hierarchy of customer groups and values to company personnel;
* Show employees in each department how their behavior can positively or negatively affect the attraction or retention of customers;
* Regularly measure and feature findings on customer satisfaction, and include bonuses if customer satisfaction rises or reaches a certain point;
* Make sure that all the distributors and dealers also are customer obsessed.

Each of the 10 points is important but together paint a rather broad – and pretty obvious – canvas. However, despite this broadness, these 10 principles do provide an easy-to use checklist for you to improve your marketing performance. I am sure that while these ‘sins’ seem very obvious, many of us continue to commit them.

Visual courtesy:https://www.flickr.com/photos/marciookabe/