How do you turn a weakness in your business into a strength? Whenever we are working with a client on a strategic marketing plan, we start with a SWOT analysis that identifies both the strengths and weaknesses of their business. The process can be quite revealing and takes some vulnerability on the part of management, but it is necessary if you are going to be effective in marketing. Identifying strengths and weaknesses is only the first step in a process to shoring up vulnerable areas of your company so you can produce more. Marketing is key to this process.

We all have weaknesses. In marketing terms, weaknesses are places where your competitors will shine a light to differentiate you from them in the eyes of customers. It is a vulnerable place where you could start to lose market share. For instance, if you are slow in responding to customer service calls, your competition will tout their excellent response time and win the customer. Likewise, if your product or service is getting better results than the competition’s product/service, you would exploit their weakness to out-market them and win more customers.

There is a way to turn your weaknesses into your strengths and it involves a marketing method I call transparent engagement. It starts with listening intently to your customers. What do they perceive to be your strengths and weaknesses? That may take the form of marketing research with customer satisfaction feedback. In 2008, Dominos Pizza took a survey of their customers via focus groups and received some very bad news: their pizza didn’t taste good. Their crust was like cardboard. The sauce was without taste. The cheese was bland. They were losing the pizza marketplace. Instead of burying the negative comments in a corporate report, they did something that was absurd. They made them public! They admitted that the customers were right: they were making bad pizza. They changed all of their recipes and created better tasting pizza. In other words, they took their weakness and made it a strength. They then began to advertise their new, better tasting pizza. They even hunted down some of the harshest critics from their focus groups and asked them to try the new recipes. Take a look at this video. The results were astounding. People began buying Dominos Pizza again and liking the new taste. Revenues instantly began to climb (even in the worst economy of the past 100 years). In the ten years since the survey, Dominos stock price has soared 2800% since their transparent engagement marketing campaign began.

Transparent engagement works very well with today’s marketing technology, where customer feedback will come to you in the form of social media comments whether you ask for it or not. But transparent engagement as a marketing method does not just wait for someone to give you a one-star rating before it reacts. It actively asks customers for feedback. It allows them to drive your product development, the way you do business, the way you are marketing to them. In other words, customer wants and desires become a priority. Is this anything new? Not really, but way too often businesses ignore their customers and try to market to them with hype and not reality. Marketer Blake Morgan, writing in Forbes, states that marketing has traditionally tried to get consumers to try a product or service by gimmicks and promises that fall short of being delivered. She writes, "For many years as marketers we've made things shinier, bigger and brighter than they actually are. And this is terrible for the customer experience. The reason is you are starting a relationship with your customer by letting them down.”¹

Try this with your current customers. Sit them down and ask them what you could do to make their experience better. What would they want in terms of the function of your products/services? What about your quality, your price, your turnaround time, and their interaction with your people? Are they getting all they want? Take this information and make changes to the way you do business. Fix the weakness. Make it your strength. But don’t stop there. Tell your story. Market the changes you’ve made to your target audience. Get the word out – you are doing something new. Transparent engagement marketing is very sellable because it gets past the hype and lets customers see the real you. Somewhere along the line someone coined the term "Honesty is the best policy.” It also is the best marketing device.

1. Why Transparency In Marketing Is Key For the Customer Experience, by Blake Morgan, Forbes, September 8, 2015