3 Questions All Marketing Needs To Answer

Be it a magazine advertisement, business card, website, vehicle graphic, or any other piece of marketing material. It has to answer three questions to be effective. These questions are as follows:

Who Is The Business?
What Do They Do?
Why Should The Viewer Care?

Seems simple, doesn’t it? Well, it is… kinda. It’s a simple concept, but in practice many designers and business owners fall short of answering these questions. Lets look at some examples:

I have in my business card organizer a card from someone I met at a business networking event once. The card reads something like this (names have been changed to protect the innocent):

Metropolis Enterprises
Specialty Business Solutions
Mike Snickers
Owner

Now, in my mind this card raises more questions than it answers. What exactly does this company do? We know it has something to do with business, but what exactly? Solutions to what problems? What exactly makes these solutions specialized? The company’s name doesn’t tell us anything, the tagline tells us little more, and there was no supporting information on the card (net even a website, not that anyone would have much reason to visit it).

Another example is countless vehicles I’ve passed on the road with giant logos pasted on the side, but no indication of what they do or why I should care.

More common, are the businesses that get the first two, but miss the third. Here’s the thing, though: the third question is the most important. Unless the company is offering a service that nobody else offers (a very rare situation, which never lasts long), answer to the third question is what convinces customers to deal with them rather than their competition.

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