Step 2: Pick Your Production Process

If you’ve successfully completed Step 1 of The Customer Factory marketing model (Designing Your Customer), you’re now ready to Pick Your Production Process, ie. choose your marketing production line.

There are a number of very productive processes to choose from such as retailing, contracting, direct sales, direct-response marketing, manufacturers’ representatives, e-commerce, wholesaling, tradeshow marketing, indirect-response marketing, etc.

The point here is to choose the process that best suits your firm, your industry, your personal objectives and your customer design, and start building an assembly line which will systematically move members of your targeted market from stranger to suspect to prospect to customer.

Let’s say you’ve started marketing cookies made from your own secret recipe. Should you sell them door-to-door (direct sales) or pitch them to local groceries and specialty shops (wholesaling)? Maybe you think you could sell them directly to consumers via direct mail and local cable insert ads (direct response marketing).

Even if, like the cookie baker, you have multiple potential production lines, you must first choose one and focus all of your attention, energies and resources on it, foresaking all others. You can revisit the others later and perhaps add a second assembly line to your overall Customer Factory.

When you’re just starting out you need to pick what you believe will be your most productive assembly line and pour the coals to it!