Richard Branson has been whipping up some PR by talking about how businesses should work to create jobs rather than focusing purely on profit. That is a nice idea if you can afford it and I am sure he is mainly aiming at big multinationals: however it is important to remember that a business’ marketing objectives aren’t always profit.

Many SME owners setup a business to be a lifestyle business; I find they often tend to have too little consideration for profit and have no flexibility if things go wrong. As long as you do consider making a profit first but worry less about how much of a profit though you can potentially build a nice business that you don’t have to work too hard at.

Turnover is sometimes more the objective than profit, often this is the case when you are building a business to sell and customers and volume of custom are what is going to be valuable to a buyer more than profit.

Increasing volume in order to employ more people or have a bigger more valuable business though is another slightly different objective that is common in medium sized businesses and shouldn’t be ignored.

Different marketing objectives first and foremost need a different approach to price and in turn a different approach to a business’ entire value chain.

Repositioning an offering as a mass market low cost option may make a business less profit but increase volume. Moving the other way may give businesses a premium brand that they feel proud of and allows them to follow philanthropic objectives such as giving a percentage of sales to charity or ensuring that they buy from ethical providers.

It is important for marketers to make sure they are clear on the marketing objectives of a business before doing work for them; it may also be necessary to help a client become clear what thier objectives are and make sure marketing objectives aren’t so disparate that it is impossible to achieve both at the same time.

Categories: Marketing Advice • Marketing Comment

Tags: brand building, increase turnover, lifestyle business, marketing objectives, pricing objectives, SME marketing, value chain