With apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson for paraphrasing his quote , here’s an easy way to make your company stand out from the rest, in a good way or in a bad way.

It’s called consistency.

But, not all companies understand the difference between consistency and foolish consistency.

In my town there’s a grocery store that exemplifies this. It’s a nice grocery store. Quality products, friendly staff, decent prices, clean and well maintained building, etc. I do 95% of my grocery shopping there.

We’re almost done dissecting the Smart Marketing Formula. This is the third of four articles explaining how the formula works.

This article will focus on the “M” in the Smart Marketing Formula which stands for Marketing Activities, Message and Market. In our formula, “M” represents everything you do to create and deliver your message to your market.

Let’s break this down and look at the pieces.

Once again, the ‘Net is abuzz with chatter about a hot new mobile phone product from a well-respected industry giant. But this time the product has already been launched and is in use by millions of Apple fans. Trouble is some of those fans are thinking less well of their good old friend Apple these days. You’d think Apple had begun ransacking small, defenseless villages from the uproar. All they did was lower their prices for crying out loud. In fact their price drop was really no more traumatic than you see in the rest of the mobile phone world. So, what’s the big deal? The big deal is, Apple should know better. They should know better because their loyal legions of fan-like customers expect better. Apple is not like most companies. Apple has fans. Apple has friends. Apple has unpaid armies of promoters who love the company. They love the company because of what the company produces and because of how it behaves. Apple is a cool company that is very good to its customers. It’s a shining example of how a very large international company can create and develop personal, almost intimate relationships with millions of people. As a result, Apple’s customers treat the company well. Their loyalty is legendary. It’s envied by organizations small and large on every continent (with the possible exception of Antarctica). So, when Apple does something like this and it rankles enough of their customers, they hear about it. And it hurts their brand. The big question is, how does this affect Apple and what should they do about it? Let’s apply this situation to the Smart Marketing Formula and see what we find. Remember the formula is: