Marketing magic

Our training last week was on Marketing. Nadine Walter (ex McKinsey and now a Professor at Pforzheim Business School in Germany) took us through the basics of how to develop a marketing plan. Ranging from the internal company and external market analysis over the consumer segmentation to the marketing strategy, mix and implementation.

It was  whirlwind, whistle-stop tour of the major frameworks in the field and really great to understand, at a high level, how all the various concepts (that you often only hear of in isolation) fit together. From PESTEL and Porter's 5 Forces over 7S and the BCG matrix to the Ansoff matrix we must have done more frame work than you can in an afternoon at the National Gallery!

As always, the real guru doesn't necessarily use all the frameworks, but knows when (and when not) to apply them and how to take the thinking from various ones to pull together real insight. And it's always refreshing to hear about situations where people achieved success by not following the traditional approach, like Red Bull.

Who do you think are the best social enterprise marketeers? Innocent stands out, of course, and (RED) is a big brand now; I like One Water's 'When you drink One Africa drinks too'. Interestingly though, 2 of these 3 examples are cause-related marketing schemes (what I sometimes call philanthropic rather than social enterprises) and the last, Innocent, is a business with a strong social influence. Thinking of more 'classic' social enterprise (that achieve direct social impact rather than through contributing profits to a charity) that are really well marketed is much more difficult. Do you know of any?