Ep 6 Growth by Targeting Customer Buying Journey

Welcome to our next episode of Material Growth, a podcast of the Material Growth Network hosted by Substack. Find the network at materialgrowth.substack.com and join a community of entrepreneurs and business developers who are focused on growth and business-building in the materials industry.

Today’s episode is an Executive Roundtable that we hosted at the end of last year, with guest speaker Bob Lurie, PhD.

Bob Lurie is the former Vice President, Corporate Strategy for Eastman. Prior to joining Eastman, he was co-managing partner of Monitor Group which was acquired by Deloitte in 2013. He founded Monitor's marketing and growth practice, known as M2C, and led it through more than a decade of double-digit growth. He was the architect of the innovative approach to organic growth that fueled M2C’s success and laid the groundwork for his book The Organic Growth Playbook.

Traditional marketing is being revolutionized today by the digital approaches and tools we have available. We’ve never had the ability as we do today to understand our customer’s buying behavior in detail through the use of digital tools. And frankly, the materials industry hasn’t figured that out yet. The standard Marketer’s playbook of Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning and the 4P’s though helpful, is simply table stakes today. It will let you keep up, but it won’t help you grow and thrive.

The core of M2C’s success and Bob's key insight is that while the traditional playbook is good, Marketing must fundamentally be re-oriented to a behavioral model, one where the behavior of the customer, understanding that behavior throughout the buying journey is the key to unlocking growth, even in highly competitive product categories. As Bob likes to put it, “how a customer buys determined what they buy.”

This growth potential is reinforced and accelerated by the tools and methods that come only in the digital marketers tool kit. In fact, I think it’s what makes digital B2B marketing really understandable in the context of materials.

Companies that choose to reorient their marketing models, stand to gain significant competitive advantage and leverage the growing digital arsenal of tools, but only if they commit to this new approach. Everyone who doesn’t could be at a significant disadvantage.

Get ready to have your thinking turned upside down as we speak with Bob Lurie here at Material Growth.

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