Know-How Exchange : Other

Dear Emily

Thanks for the clarification; it certainly makes your position much more understandable regarding the four P’s of marketing. Let’s have a look at them and challenge the assumptions that you can’t use marketing. From what you’ve said marketing would not be a straightforward matter of letting potential customers know that you exist and what the benefits of using your pipeline are. It’s more to do with communicating with your users and the regulator (Which is still marketing by the way!) and a large chunk of strategic selling. If you go back to those who won the contract for constructing the pipeline or those who sold the pipeline’s capacity to the producers in the first place, you’ve got an idea of the magnitude of the task you are taking on.

Product
Well there’s not a lot you can do about a pipeline which already exists to an existing engineering spec. You can’t increase the volume, the flow or the pressure without re-building the thing, so that’s probably out of the question. However the pipeline offers a service and has associated maintenance overheads, switching, monitoring, condition forecasting, volume forecasting and other associated reporting. Whilst pipeline failure or non forecast-shut down is rarer in gas pipelines than for oil pipelines, it is still a significant and disruptive event. I was originally thinking of the Prudhoe Bay oil pipeline for BP but there are dozens of Gas pipeline incidents such as the Corrib gas pipeline for Shell. It is a long term piece of marketing, but you should be preparing to let both your customers, the regulator the trade press and the national press know what steps your engineers have taken to ensure the smooth operation of your pipeline over the next 10 or 15 years.

Price
Are regulators beyond influence? Of course they are not! Depending on where you are located, they are not likely to respond well to gifts or to other traditional marketing incentives. In the West they are pretty well incorruptible and aim to remain that way, so even a hint at securing influence through material inducement would blow your credibility out of the water.

But you must remember that they are being lobbied by consumer groups, called to account by government and being challenged by the producers and other transmission companies. You will need to “Market” your company to the regulator by regularly finding out what concerns him or her. The difference here between lobbying (Which is often counter productive) and what I’d propose is that you seek an ongoing dialogue with the regulator in order to sound them out on ideas which would benefit your company, the customers and whichever bunch of interfering politico’s set up the regulatory framework in the first place.

Place
You are self evidently correct in saying that there isn’t much chance of moving the pipeline to a better high street, but place can also refer to your position in the market.
And the route you choose to market. See: https://www.quickmba.com/marketing/mix/ By the way, they don’t permit copying from their website, so don’t try it without permission or you’ll get yourself excluded.

Viewing place as route to market, you will also benefit from a SWOT analysis which might possible indicate that there is a threat in the future to your current position from new operators in the business or even a change in the business model for selling gas. It’s unlikely, but having a plan B is always useful for companies which operate over strategically long term timescales. Let’s face it, if for any reason your company or your pipeline were to be wiped from the map, the producers would find another way of getting their gas to market. The fact that they could do it in an emergency means that they might be tempted to do likewise for commercial reasons.

Promotion
This is where you are currently centered. You can promote and you can sell, taking the long term. It is quite a challenge to maintain a consistent marketing message over several years and even harder to maintain a sales effort, when no one is going to see an order worth real hard cash come in until later in the decade. But selling is what you need to do. Split the sales and marketing process up into a series of shorter term objectives and measure your progress against these goals as you are going along.

Doing this kind of marketing plan will also ensure that you can meet the contingencies raise in the other 3 P’s should they arise in a timely fashion and “On the front foot” in respect of your state of communications with the producers, the regulator and possibly with the relevant department in Government.

Quite a task though!

Regards


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions