Companies NOT HAPPY with Marketing and Product Development, Survey Finds.

CONCORD, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 17, 1999--"Marketing should be the company's navigator," says marketing consultant Bradley E. Hosmer, President of The Beta Consulting Group, a marketing management firm based in Concord, New Hampshire. "Yet too many marketers are steering by lodestone in this age of satellite navigation." Hosmer bases his comment on the results of his firm's annual Business Outlook Survey, released today, which reported on business experiences in 1998 and 1999.

Findings from the survey revealed low ratings given by surveyed companies to their own marketing and product development functions. Yet many companies also cited "innovative marketing" and "new products/innovation" as two key strategies for 1999.

As a result of such findings, and assisted by over 30 years' experience of marketing, manufacturing, and management consulting, Hosmer concludes that:

1. Companies too often react to immediate situations - a quarterly quota, a crisis with a client - instead of researching, thinking, planning ahead. "They are scrambling, not leading," he says. "But a lost customer is giving you free advice, telling you (indirectly) you're missing a business opportunity."

2. Too few companies use the wealth of customer information that's readily available to them. "They develop products that their intended customers don't want or they generate thousands of leads they're unable to follow up on."

3. Too often companies keep selling what they've been selling all along, no matter what, rather than offering customers what they wish they could buy. For example, one Beta client with stagnant sales discovered, after some soul-searching with help from Hosmer, that its customers needed a product that no one was making. A great business opportunity hiding in plain sight!

Even overworked marketers can do more than they may think possible. Systems can be learned for conducting market research, and for sifting out the best leads and then devoting high levels of attention to them. There are even techniques for wringing more information - and consequently more business opportunities - from customers, competitors, and other departments in your own company.

Finally, Hosmer reminds, marketing's especially important when things are going well because that's precisely when it's easy to forget to look for what else customers need that you could be providing.

To obtain a copy of Beta's Business Outlook Survey 1998/1999 or to conduct a media interview with Brad Hosmer, call Beta at 603-226-3567 or email [e-mail]. You may also visit Beta's website at www.betacg.com.