Mission Based Marketing: How Your Not for Profit Can Succeed in a More Competitive World

I wish that I had written "Mission-Based Marketing," Consultant Peter Brinckerhoff's smart, well-written book. Certainly the title is terrific, underscoring as it does that the only effective marketing a nonprofit can do is mission-based. But more than that Brinckerhoff has written a basic book on marketing that nonetheless propounds some very advanced views. "Mission-Based Marketing," along with its companion workbook "Mission-Based Marketing: An Organizational Development Workbook," is largely a book for the reluctant and the novice nonprofit marketer, his board or staff. There's a lot of handholding here, including lengthy treatises on the subjects of `competition' (it's ultimately good, he says) and `flexibility' (it's even better). By the same token, "Mission-Based" is conspicuously free of basic marketing concepts like "four Ps." There's little of substance on pricing theory, and nothing much on branding, a pet subject of most for-profit marketing mavens. Instead, Brinckerhoff starts by laying out in plain-spoken English why nonprofits who may have thought of marketing as `sales' and thereby unsavory, have to get past that idea. He calls such thinking the "non-profit marketing disability." It stems, he says, from knowing what your constituents "need" and caring little about what they "want;" filling wants being the defining and thereby unsavory element of for-profit marketing. But Brinckerhoff easily dispatches the non-profit marketing disability before the twentieth page. For that matter, he takes the starch out of the taint of sales while he's at it. Imagine a would-be client at a treatment facility dangerous to herself or others, he suggests. The client needs treatment, but she doesn't want it. Since she's an adult, you can't force her into treatment. But you can market to her, in this case `sell' her on treatment. "The job of the mission-based marketer is to make the person want what they need," he says. Ergo, "good marketing is good mission." Nice! Even with all the handholding, there's still plenty relevant here for more sophisticated mission-based marketers, especially the chapters on customer service and marketing planning. But it's a testament to the value and validity of this book that I finished "Mission-Based Marketing" along the same time I was reading an issue of "Marketing Management," a magazine published by the American Marketing Association, and I found them markedly similar. Several scholar-members of the AMA have proposed changing the product-centric four Ps marketing mix to the customer-centric "SIVA," [solutions, information, value and access]. This is cutting-edge thinking from the leading lights of world's largest marketing membership group, and it mirrors in broad strokes Brinckerhoff's central themes. I have quibbles, but they're minor. In chapter five on the marketing cycle, he takes his 6-part customer-centric approach, so similar to SIVA, out for a trot. The second stage "market inquiry" or "what do your

Peter Brinckerhoff has written a great book for anyone interested in making their organization more responsive and relevant to its community. "Marketing" is often a dirty word in the nonprofit community, since it conjures up images of carnival hucksters and hard-sell advertising campaigns. Of course, PR and advertising are important to nonprofits, and these activities are part of a mission-based, customer-focused nonprofit's marketing plan. Brinckerhoff has identified six steps in the nonprofit marketing cycle: 1) market definition and redefinition; 2) market inquiry; 3) service design & innovation; 4) setting your price; 5) promotion & distribution; and 6) evaluation. Nonprofits suffer from a unique "marketing disability" that inhibits their ability to reinvent themselves in a customer-focused way. Brinckerhoff explains that marketing is about meeting customer wants, not customer needs. Nonprofits, their staffs, boards, and donors/funders, often believe that wants are largely irrelevant -- nonprofits are designed to address clients' needs and gaps in services. Such thinking not only dulls the senses to client satisfaction, it also leads to thinking of donors and other potential funders (government contracts, grants, regulators, etc.) as adversaries rather than as customers. Nonprofits are becoming larger, more sophisticated, more "professional," and increasingly competitive. Brinckerhoff asserts that the days of a nonprofit's monopoly in a particular market is rapidly giving way to intrepid, marketing savvy, customer-focused competition. Organizations slow to respond to changing markets are likely to find themselves under increased stress and decreasing clientele and funding support. The book is an excellent resource for boards as a strategic planning aid and for executives and staffs as an operational tool, complete with checklists and tables to aid each step in the marketing cycle. As important as these procedural tools are, the real contribution of this book is to encourage all in the nonprofit sector to think about marketing as an integral part of overall strategy and operations. Small, incremental changes will, over time, cause great systemic change and improvement in a nonprofit. This book helps one develop the "marketing eye" that will open the opportunity for such changes.

Mission-Based Marketing by Peter Brinckerhoff is a terrific example of one of those "helper" books. It does more than "help" me. It helps organizations look at their marketing programs, their missions, their customers and their staffs. It is very easy to read and very well organized with plenty of concrete examples and case histories. In fact, the examples were the biggest aspect of the book from which I was able to learn principles that Brinckerhoff was trying to teach. After reading this book the reader will have basic principles and concrete ways to write a marketing plan and to carry it out for a successful business. Although it is intended for not-for-profits it can easily be utilized by any business.