Marketing.....nothing

What happens when your company has no competitive advantage? What happens when your company is in an industry where acheiving a competitive advantage is near impossible? When differentiating yourself from your competitors is a tough thing to do.

Do you fold up shop? Do you spend oodles of money marketing your brand?

This blog idea came to me yesterday as I was watching TV and saw an add for Wal-Greens pharmacy. The entire ad didn't really say anything and seemed like an incredible waste of time (would post it if I could find it on youtube but a cursory glance returned nothing for obvious reasons). Then I started thinking, well how else are they going to get customers to get their prescriptions there, because lets be honest there is a lot of money to be made in prescription filling. But the question behind their commercial/marketing campaign should have been "Why would customers get their prescriptions filled with us?" and they should have developed it based on that question.

Maybe answering it is the tough part and will take a lot of research or getting everyone together for an entire day of brainstorming, but its probably better than burning your marketing dollars on a commercial just to say your doing something. Use your customers, find out what they would like in a pharmacy, maybe its speediness, price, comfort, customer service, knowledge, you never know until you ask.

But that is the challenge that their marketing department should accept greedily as this is their e=mc squared.