Sweet Spot

What if your business could make growth and innovation look easy? What if you could beat the competition day in and day out? You can. Sweet Spot shows you how to align all the vital parts of your business to create a competitive advantage and long-lasting success. You’ll learn how to bring smart marketing together with good leadership to find your business’s sweet spot.

Introduction xiii

PART ONE

Marketing needs to change. To get a sense of marketing the way it should be, you need to understand how companies get into the sweet spots of the business world.

1 Marketing, Sweet Marketing 3

My journey, so far, has taken place on different continents; but it has also been a journey of finding a new way to think about marketing.

2 Sweet Spotting 21

It’s an elite league. Sweet spot companies come in an array of different sizes and come armed with their own uniquely sweet recipes.

3 The Qualifying Rounds 37

What’s the game about? Sweet spotters move the market, become an alluring investment, outdate to innovate, create a boffo buzz, court competition, and exude Z-Leadership!

4 Growing around in Circles 63

And then there’s the big picture: Understanding growth and the concept of full-circle marketing. The root of your growth strategy begins here.

PART TWO

How do you get into a sweet spot? You develop the right skills, marketing skills. You have to mine minds, demarcate demand, turn your logo into an icon, mobilize champions-in-chief, and
employ advocates—not workers.

5 Mining Minds 81

Sweet Spot Skill #1: Learn to march to the beat of the buyer. To do that, you have to do more than love the customer: you have to think the way he thinks and grow the way he grows.

6 Demarcating Demand 109

Sweet Spot Skill #2: Avoid “everybody” traps; they’ll lead you where everyone else is heading. Reinvent your market. Link your seller specs to the buyer’s specs—then add a tad more. Build competitive moats.

7 From Logo to Icon 135

Sweet Spot Skill #3: Brands are the heart and soul of sweet spot companies. At its peak, your brand becomes a product generator and value creator. This does not happen by accident. Brands must be created and nurtured; brands must be built to move from logo to icon.

8 Champions-in-Chief 163

Sweet Spot Skill #4: Make your top executives the first new members of the marketing department. It’s a good thing if your C-suite residents become overtly identified with your company’s product line. Are your top executives on a campaign?

9 Employ Advocates, Not Workers 187

Sweet Spot Skill #5: Market from the inside out! Don’t sleep easy until all your employees are on the sales team. How to start? Create employee heroes. Most importantly, listen until it hurts.

10 The Stuff That Marketing Is Made Of 211

When the going gets tough, the tough keep marketing. Goals are important. Skills are critical. Now, let’s check your attitude.

Notes 223

Bibliography 232

Index 234

Arun Sinha is the Chief Marketing Officer at Pitney Bowes, where he is respons-ible for marketing, brand management, public and media relations, Web strategy, and marketing research worldwide. Throughout his career in senior marketing positions, he has successfully launched twenty new brands and grown the brand equity of many world-renowned brands at Colgate-Palmolive, the Ford Motor Company, Philip Morris, and Pitney Bowes. Everyone knows about the sweet spot in sports—that moment when everything feels and works just right. The sweet spot is that instant in which athletes at the top of their game make difficult tasks look easy. But sweet spots aren't the sole preserve of sports. Business, too, has its sweet spots—when a company's brands, products and services, finances, leaders, and marketers are all in tune with each other and with consumer needs, aspirations, and budgets. When a business hits its sweet spot and everyone in the organization is aligned properly, growth, innovation, and success become natural and easy.

Arun Sinha has held high-level marketing positions with some of the most innovative and successful companies in the world, and he knows how the business sweet spot works. In Sweet Spot, he argues that the key to growth is finding those sweet spots repeatedly. Packed with fresh ideas and innovative strategy—and numerous case studies and illuminating anecdotes from his own battle-tested experience—this guide to revolutionary marketing shows marketers and executives how to align, connect, and grow in tune with each other.

Sinha reveals how too many companies today are mired in the old way of doing things. They keep marketing a separate and distinct function in the company, expecting marketers to save the day when problems crop up or take the blame when products and campaigns fail. But the most successful companies, rather than marginalize it, include marketing in the leadership fold so that it can contribute to the company's overall good health and success. To prove it, Sinha includes a wealth of real-life marketing feats that show what happens when a company truly finds its sweet spot. These true stories provide the inspiration and motivation needed to move marketing forward in your own business, integrating it into the heart of your leadership and decision-making processes. Not only does the book reveal these "great moments in marketing," but it also explains why and how these moments and ideas made a critical difference.

Marketing has to move away from the old ideas in order to survive; and businesses have to change the way they use marketing if they want to grow. Today's best and fastest growing companies know that marketing is more than a function; it's the heart and soul of a successful operation. Follow their lead and you'll put your company right where it needs to be—in the sweet spot.

Hit Your Company's Sweet Spot...

The sweet spot is that moment in sports when effort and talent combine perfectly to produce smooth and successful execution. When baseball's best hitters find the sweet spot, they can make the hardest task in sports look easy.

What if your business could make growth and innovation look easy? What if you could beat the competition day in and day out? Now you can. When you bring innovative branding and marketing together with smart leadership and great products, making customers happy is a walk in the park. If you want to learn how to align all the parts of your business to create a competitive advantage—and long-lasting success—it's time to find your Sweet Spot.

"Arun Sinha confronts the realities of marketing. The book is packed with contemporary examples. An easy and compelling read."
—Ram Charan, bestselling coauthor of Execution and Confronting Reality

"Sweet Spot demystifies and simplifies the complexity surrounding marketing and branding. Sinha's personal storytelling, experience, and business examples provide an easy framework for achieving marketing nirvana and creating business advantage."
—Allan Steinmetz, CEO, Inward Strategic Consulting, Inc.

"I am in heated agreement with Arun Sinha that success comes to those companies where marketing is central to the business. The question is how to actually make this happen. Arun gives us a thorough examination of what the world's best companies do specifically to maximize their marketing game, and how they get all the pieces of the organization in perfect alignment to hit the 'sweet spot' of success."
—Shelly Lazarus, Chairman and CEO, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide

"It is an excellent book - one of the best in recent memory about marketing."--Chairman and CEO of FedEx, Frederick W. Smith

"Arun Sinha has called to attention a new way of thinking that will help businesses move the market. Through his ‘sweet spotting’ skills and strategies, Sinha provides a fresh perspective on marketing processes that can help organizations think differently about how to optimize and create market opportunities to achieve ongoing success. A definite-must read for marketers of all levels!" --Chief Marketing Officer of Yahoo! , Cammie Dunaway

"Arun Sinha confronts the new realities of marketing. The book is well packed with contemporary examples. An easy and compelling read."--Ram Charan, Best selling co-author of Execution and Confronting Realities. Author of forthcoming book, Know-how Substance of Successful Leadership.

"Sweet Spot de-mystifies and simplifies the complexity surrounding marketing and branding. Arun Sinha’s personal story telling, experience and business examples provide an easy framework for achieving marketing nirvana and creating business advantage."--Allan Steinmetz, CEO, Inward Strategic Consulting Inc.

"I am in heated agreement with Arun Sinha that success comes to those companies where marketing is central to the business. The question is how to actually make this happen. Arun gives us a thorough examination of what the world’s best companies do specifically to maximize their marketing game, and how they get all the pieces of the organization in perfect alignment to hit the ‘sweet spot’ of success."--Shelly Lazarus, Chairman and CEO, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide