What Kind of Marketing Chef Are You?

I love all things cooking.  The different cuisines, emerging food and restaurant trends (hello, brussel sprouts!), and the way grocery stores are continually adding new products to keep up with the growing demand for ingredients like cactus, rose water, and smoked applewood salt.

If you like cooking, too, then you also probably love the food channels on TV like The Food Network and The Cooking Channel.  Watching the various chefs and their different strategies and techniques lately, it got me thinking about the different strategies and techniques marketers use.

Let's do a comparison.  Two of the most popular food shows of all time are Iron Chef and The French Chef (by Julia Child), but they are starkly different when you get into the strategy, ingredient selection, and delivery methods of each.

Mario Batali

Iron Chefs are tasked with cooking a meal featuring a predetermined "secret" ingredient, and then rush hurriedly through a stocked kitchen furiously grabbing ingredients in order to perform and cook a full-course meal - all within an hour.  This is reactionary cooking at its finest, but is entertaining because it appeals to many peoples' taste for the dramatic.

In comparison, keeping in mind the purpose of and audience for her meal, Julia Child put together a fitting menu and took the time to prepare artful meals with many complicated steps to impress her guests and give them an amazing experience.  Moreover, she carefully selected the most fresh and local ingredients for each of her meals, used exact instructions, and followed a precise plan to ensure the finished product was nothing short of genius.  

Julia Child

While Child took a completely different approach to cooking than the Iron Chef celebrities, in my opinion, her presentations ended up being even more dramatic because the time and effort she put into each of her dishes was clearly evident.

What kind of chef are you when it comes to marketing?  Are you a reactionary marketer who takes an Iron Chef approach to promoting your bank or credit union by hurriedly rushing through your objectives?  Or, more ala Julia Child, do you take the time to consider your target audience and artfully put together a campaign or message that is perfectly-suited for your audience as part of a precise plan to meet the overall organizational goals?  Ponder that over your next meal and, until next time...bon appetit!

Amanda


MarketMatch solves business problems for banks and credit unions through marketing by providing FOCUS, generating MOMENTUM, and creating measurable RESULTS.  

Contact me to learn how MarketMatch can help you with your marketing efforts, whether it is through marketing strategy, branding or rebranding, budget planning, and much more.  Learn more about all of our client services by clicking here.

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