The first mistake 90% of marketers make when planning...

At any given moment in any business, there are only one or two key marketing actions. Even the slightest touch on it can lead to earth-shaking changes.

The world-famous New York subway crime control case is one of my favorite cases.

The 1980s was a dark period of rampant crime in New York, with more than 600,000 serious crimes each year and over 2,000 murders alone. The subway was the hardest hit area, with "chaos" inside. The citizens of New York have suffered greatly, to the point of outrage from both humans and gods, but despite the large number of police forces deployed, there has been no change in the situation.

On December 22, 1984, a middle-aged man named Goetz shot and injured four black youths on the subway during a suspected robbery. The court found Goetz not guilty of assault and released him without charge. Afterwards, New Yorkers spontaneously organized celebration rallies on the streets, and Goetz was treated like a hero and was called the "Angel of Revenge."

Incredibly, New York's crime rate dropped dramatically in the following years of the early 1990s; by 1996, the crime rate had fallen by about half of its peak, and murders had fallen by two-thirds. How did such a miracle happen?

Let's imagine that facing such a problem, the usual solution is this:

1. Increase efforts , that is, strengthen the power to solve problems; for example, increase police force, enhance business capabilities, and make more reasonable regional deployment.

2. Dig out the root causes and think of solutions to the deep-seated root causes of the problem; for example, legal education activities, socialist spiritual civilization construction, and reciting the Eight Honors and Eight Shames.

3. Identify typical cases ; eradicate evil and crack down on gangs, launch special rectification campaigns, and focus on preventing those with criminal records.

4. Build a system ; 110 rapid response system, must arrive at the scene within ten minutes, police-civilian cooperation system, etc.

For Lao Miao and all the readers who were "born in the new society and grew up under the red flag", these must be very familiar: "increase efforts, dig out the roots, identify typical cases, and build a system" is simply a magic weapon to solve all problems.

However, William Bratton, the genius New York Transit Police Commissioner who took office in 1990, was a firm believer in the "broken windows theory" . He believed that the "dirty, messy and poor" subway environment was the key action inducement for criminal activities, so he adopted a seemingly very alternative approach: starting with "fare evasion" and starting with stopping and cleaning up graffiti in the subway . This seems idealistic and unrealistic to many people.

However, a miracle happened. As the subway environment became cleaner and more orderly, the crime rate in the New York subway dropped rapidly. Then in 1994, Bratton was appointed New York City Police Commissioner. He applied this approach to policing throughout New York, and just as he had experienced in the subways, crime rates throughout the city dropped dramatically. New York has become one of the safest major cities in the United States.

One key action fundamentally changed the situation!

Let’s look at a more meaningful case. In 1988, on the 60th birthday of the King of Thailand, he suddenly went crazy and issued a general amnesty, pardoning more than 30,000 criminals. Thailand almost suffered a devastating disaster as a result.

Many pardoned prisoners celebrated lavishly by partying, getting high in groups, and injecting drugs. A few months later, half of drug users in Thailand were infected with HIV. Subsequently, HIV spread across the country, and within about a year, one-third of sex workers were infected with HIV, followed by men who bought sex, unsuspecting wives at home, and newborns. At that time, experts from all over the world predicted that by 1993, the number of infections in Thailand would exceed one million, and one-quarter of the country's adults would be infected.

The rapid spread of AIDS in Thailand shocked the whole world, even to the point where everyone was in danger, triggering a worldwide panic. Older readers may remember that during that period, some experts predicted that Thailand might perish as a result of AIDS, and even that humanity might be wiped out by AIDS.

Experts from the World Health Organization and local medical workers in Thailand also launched the anti-epidemic campaign "at the first opportunity", including Dr. Wei Watt, a WHO "AIDS prevention" expert. Readers can imagine what they have done under the idea of ​​"increasing efforts, digging out the root causes, identifying typical cases, and building a system": popularizing knowledge, controlling the crowd, and strengthening the strength of medical personnel and even police officers. However, all these efforts were declared failures.

Dr. Wewatt, who suffered a setback, put aside the brochures compiled by many experts, temporarily gave up popular education for the general public, started new research, and finally made a bold action: concentrate his efforts on entering sex trade venues and let sex workers require 100% of their customers to use condoms.

It was this action, which seemed to be "treating the symptoms but not the root cause", that quickly curbed the spread of HIV in Thailand and saved Thailand. Subsequently, Dr. Wewatt began to launch his global initiative - "100% use of condoms in unknown sexual behaviors" , which effectively controlled the spread of AIDS around the world. In the great cause of fighting AIDS, Dr. Weiwat has achieved the highest global achievement to date. Of course, Durex is also grateful to him.

In 2003, YaKe had already achieved some success after ten years of accumulation. But for a company in its early stages of development, there are many things that need to be done in marketing, including management system, network refinement, product sorting, and terminal construction, each of which is extremely important. But the boss of Chen Tianjiang did not try to do everything at once or use a shotgun approach. Instead, he concentrated almost all his efforts on seeking a "breakthrough in star products." This led to the emergence of Yake V9, and the company took a huge leap forward.

In its early days, Jinjiu was developed from a health care product operating model. However, in the new century, the "health care product trust crisis" has intensified, and health care product companies are in dire straits. However, Jinjiu fundamentally reversed this problem with one key move: it switched its small wines into small catering channels.

Hidden behind this is a strategic change, which is to weaken the attributes of health products and enhance the attributes of wine. Any strategy relies on one or two key behaviors to be implemented, and using "small wine to run small restaurants" is the key behavior to realize this strategy. This brought a qualitative leap to Jinjiu. Not only was it not affected by the trust crisis in health products, but its sales continued to rise. Its annual sales have reached nearly 10 billion yuan, firmly occupying its position as the leader in health wine.

After the 2008 financial crisis, due to huge investment stimulus, real estate companies ushered in a super platinum period of development. All real estate companies are frantically acquiring land, but money is limited and banks have loaned all they can. The most critical factor that determines the development of a company is the efficiency of your use of funds.

At Wanda, "speed" has become the overriding priority. Boss Wang Jianlin proposed the "Wanda speed" of 18 months from land acquisition to opening of a project, and the key behavior to ensure the "Wanda speed" is "standardization": "land acquisition standardization", "construction standardization", "organizational standardization", "financial standardization", and of course "marketing standardization".

It is precisely these standardized measures that have enabled Wanda to be far ahead of its peers in terms of capital utilization efficiency, thus seizing the best period of real estate industry development and growing from a medium-sized real estate company to a leading domestic commercial real estate company.

At any stage of any enterprise, there are only one or two key marketing behaviors. If we can focus our resources on key behaviors, even a small touch can bring about earth-shaking changes. The author calls this key behavior discovered through deep marketing insights the “marketing button.”

When Mengniu's "cow ran at the speed of a rocket", Niu Gensheng said that advertising was the only factor related to sales (roughly). So, "advertising" was Mengniu's marketing button at that time.

Coincidentally, when Shi Yuzhu was working on Nongfu Spring, he could ignore other things but had to personally take care of the advertising matters; but when he was making games, he no longer cared about the advertising but focused on the game product itself. As the environment, business conditions, industry, etc. change, key behaviors also change. Before it was advertising, now it is products.

Military thought emphasizes concentrating forces to fight a war of annihilation. Chairman Mao said, "It is better to cut off one finger than to injure ten fingers." Finding the right "finger" and breaking it is a key act in war.

In the second phase of the War of Liberation, the Kuomintang concentrated 24 reorganized divisions and more than 400,000 troops to attack the Shandong Liberated Area.

In this battle, the Kuomintang learned the lesson of being divided and eliminated in the past, and adopted the tactics of close proximity and advancing in unison. The situation of our army was extremely grim.

Under the leadership of Chen Yi and Su Yu, the Huaye Army patiently negotiated the situation while looking for opportunities to fight. Finally, they seized the opportunity when Zhang Lingfu made a slight advance and the Kuomintang was unable to rescue each other, and destroyed the Kuomintang's ace of aces - the reorganized 74th Division - at Menglianggu. Marshal Chen Yi praised General Su Yu for this battle as "taking the head of a general among millions of soldiers."

"Eliminating the 74th Division" rather than "all-out confrontation with the Kuomintang army of more than 400,000" was the key action to smash the Kuomintang's focused attack on Shandong.

However, it is regrettable that many companies do not focus their resources on key behaviors, but prefer to invest in endless arguments about so-called "models" and "systems".

We all have this instinct: once a problem occurs, we tend to attribute it to a powerful factor that is beyond our control, so that our stress will be reduced. In marketing management, this phenomenon is very common. Our solutions are always habitually oriented towards a large, less specific thing rather than one or two key behaviors.

"This problem is ultimately a system problem," and the construction of the system cannot be changed overnight. In this case, we will take it step by step. Everyone will be under less pressure and can continue to have fun easily.

"The root cause of this problem is the quality of personnel." How can people's quality be improved just by saying so? So we should strengthen the training and recruitment of personnel. Even more amazing ones can come up with golden sentences like "train through practice, improve through training." Such a summary has both "height" and leaves room for myself and the people in my team. It is easy to explain to superiors, subordinates and oneself, and naturally wins cheers.

There are also other such problems, such as "business or marketing model problems", "brand aging problems", "product life cycle problems", "channel problems", "team execution problems", and so on.

For the boss, when the company is relatively small, there are very few things it can do, so he can focus all his energy on key behaviors; once the company becomes larger and has more resources, it seems that he can do a lot, so he wants to cover everything: product management system, sales management system, terminal construction process, everything that can be done.

However, you can’t do twenty things at once; you need to focus on a few key behaviors rather than many.

For some professional managers, mentioning specific actions always carries great risks, is very likely to be questioned, and appears to be "not high enough."

If you say "we are going east", someone will question why we are not going south or west. If you say "we are going to where the sun is", not only is the possibility of being questioned reduced, but it also seems very classy. When a plan is made vague and placed in a grand system, it becomes very difficult to falsify and the security is extremely high. This is the way of survival for many senior professional managers in large companies , and it is also an important reason why large companies are prone to disputes.

What companies pursue in marketing is marketing results. They must remember that only behavior can bring results, not systems, concepts, methods, or tools, which are all means to make key marketing behaviors more effective. There can only be one or two key behaviors at the same time, because you can’t do more things at the same time. This is the marketing button that the author advocates.

As long as you can find this button, no matter how complex the problem seems, it will collapse as easily as a deck of cards. Again: behavior! Only actions can bring you results!

Finally, Lao Miao would like to share with everyone a “button” about the relationship between husband and wife: What kind of couple can live together until old age ? Family background? educate? appearance? character? interest? Or is it zodiac sign, blood type or Chinese zodiac sign?

Research by Howard Markman, a famous relationship expert, shows that the above factors may have some impact, but they are all vague and "high-sounding" and have no practical use. There is only one key behavior that truly determines the long-term relationship between couples. Just by observing this one behavior, he can determine the direction of a couple's relationship in fifteen minutes.

The "button" for a couple's relationship given by Markman is this: when a couple discusses a topic on which they have different opinions, if there is a lot of accusations, emotional excitement, or one party withdraws from the discussion, their future will be bleak; if they can first declare mutual respect, communicate with each other for a common purpose, temporarily suppress their emotions and avoid excitement, their future will be completely different.

The accuracy rate is over 90%, this is the power of the "button" !

Author: Miao Qingxian

Source: Lao Miao Si Marketing