Marketing Through The Eyes of a 10 Year Old...

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MARKETINGNETWORKINGSALES

Samuel Ndonga

11/16/20211 min read

Let me take you back to a time when marketing used to be easy for me. I must confess that during that time I had no idea it was marketing but I guess that is why it worked.

Back in primary school, like a number of students, my parents ensured I got packed food for my break. Other students would carry money and buy from the canteen. Anyway with my personality, it led to me sharing my food especially with those who forget their money or food for break. This is what in marketing you would call building my networks by giving value without expecting anything in return. The chances of that person remembering you are very high right? Additionally, it can also be considered that I was testing the market with free samples, to see what the audience liked and disliked.

Over the next couple days, the same people came to ask if I was willing to sell my break and offered a good price for it. The interesting thing is the money being offered was enough to buy anything at the canteen and be full; you can imagine the decision I made. I did not know it then but I had a product that people saw the value and they were willing to pay accordingly for it. The funny thing is, there was demand but my supply depended on what food was going to be given to me that day. However, after a month I roughly knew what to expect from my supplier and I was able to meet the demands.

The business of selling my break took off quite well and I was making a good amount of money which I could use to buy anything from the canteen. I had no problem eating from the canteen. The next issue came when word spread about my break and people seemed to prefer it more than the food being offered by the canteen. At this stage without realizing it, I had created advocates who would share positive reviews about my product.

So now that demand increased, I had to schedule people depending on their food preferences and what I had in stock. You can imagine the struggle because the supplier was my parents and I could not go and tell them to increase my food for break. Nonetheless, I figured out a way to increase my food, by increasing variety of the food with things like fruits. Another important lesson, know your audience and because I did, I had people who were interested in just buying the fruits to stay healthy. Something the Canteen at the time did not have-identifying gaps in the market.

I used to give out my container which had my food and after they return, I would ask: “How was it today?” And I would use that feedback to know what to inform my parents to change if possible or maintain if they liked it. Again, you can see the marketing aspect of collecting feedback from my clients to better improve my product and satisfy the customer needs.

Anyway, this continued for a while until I moved schools. However, that experience exposed me to marketing and business without even knowing it. Unlike today’s marketing experience which has become complex and companies are using expensive systems to understand people, during my experience I spent no money on advertising. All the advertising of services was done by my customers and I had a relationship with my customers.

In my opinion, I believe that the human interaction of talking and knowing your customers is much more important than data being collected about them. Yes, you will know their habits and interests told to you by data collected by machines but humans are complex, there are just behaviors you cannot explain without having that close interaction with your customers. Let’s not just use data, humans are more than data, let’s connect and build networks. Marketing should not be that technical when you can talk to one another. We are Human Beings.