From marketing planning training through to leadership coaching, Hard Management offers a unique approach to gaining sustainable competitive advantage.

Value-based marketing

Peter Doyle explains the reason why value-based marketing is so critical:

"Accounting profits encourage an excessively short-term view of business. They also encourage an under-investment in information-based assets - staff, brands, and customer and supplier relationships. In today's information age, the accounting focus only on tangible assets makes little sense now that these intangible assets are the overwhelming source of value creation.."

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Hard Management offers a range of services to help companies move toward value-based marketing:

• training
• consultancy
• coaching
• projects

How can we be sure that our marketing will actually increase the value of the firm. This does not simply mean, "Will we generate a profit this year"; many profitable firms are actually declining in value. "Value" looks beyond the traditional financial statements, P&L and Balance Sheet, and considers the assets that do not appear on either of these and yet are the most important assets in the business - the intangibles:

• brand
• customer and supplier relationships
• skills, knowledge, experience and attitudes
• etc

The financial aspects of the marketing plan must incorporate these elements - otherwise the firm becomes trapped in short-term-ism, shying away from the required investments to gain long-term sustainable competitive advantage. Hard Management has considerable expertise in this area - visit our finance pages for more information. We can even provide training or consultancy to help build Excel models to support your marketing planning activities.

Hard Management's value-based marketing programmes can help firms to:

• value brands
• evaluate investment opportunities
• set advertising expenditure
• prepare long-term plans
• develop new products and markets

In particular, we can help marketing professionals to communicate their strategies and plans in a language that is intelligible to financial directors. In short, marketing is not restricted to justification in terms of "it will raise awareness" or "it will build brand value"; it can now be justified with "hard figures".

Please use the links below or the menu at the top of the page (hover over our logo) to find out more about our services.

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