Our mission with this masterclass is to teach you how to research, write and deliver customer-obsessed marketing plans that are designed to give you pricing power, which is the power to put up prices and increase profits without losing customers.

94-year-old Warren Buffett, the most well-known and successful investor of all time said this about pricing power: "The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you've got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you've got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you've got a terrible business."

We begin our masterclass by asking you to become comfortable with perhaps the most uncomfortable idea in marketing, which was coined by the communications strategist Sarah Cater.

"YOU ARE NOT THE CUSTOMER."

Trying to figure out a customer's behaviour based on your own experiences is fatal to a startup. 

So being customer-obsessed means putting your customer first in everything you do, starting with a marketing plan that becomes the voice of the customer inside your startup.

We then explain how to conduct market research and segmentation, which is when you cut your market into manageable chunks. 

After showing you how to diagnose your market, we move on to the three parts of marketing strategy: who are you targeting, what is your position and what are your objectives?

Targeting is the most important choice you'll ever make as a startup. Where are you going to play and - more importantly - where are you not going to play.

"Positioning is not what you do to the product: it's what you do to the mind of the prospect. It's how you differentiate your brand in the mind," says the authors of Positioning, a classic marketing book from 1981. We will teach you how to write a positioning statement that you can share with all your stakeholders to help them understand where you're coming from with this company of yours.

The art of setting good objectives requires you to do three things: build a bespoke purchase funnel (the backbone of your strategy), work with SMART objectives (SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Ambitious, Realistic and Timely), and transmit your strategy to your colleagues and suppliers by learning to brief well.

After strategy comes tactics, the famous 4 P's: product, price, promotion and place. 

To help you improve your product, you'll learn about Clayton Christensen's jobs-to-be-done framework and a helpful tool called the Net Promoter Score.

We'll also show you how price is a three-part discipline: setting the price, the price itself and then communicating the price. We'll examine two different ways of setting price - cost-plus and value-added - and the impact of behavioural economics on price. We'll also discuss how price is the crucial driver of profit, why you must avoid pricing low and why you should NEVER EVER EVER discount.

Promotion is an important tactic. It's where all the glamour and the clamour is. The PR. The Advertising. The whizz-bang stuff. The trouble is that many startups believe, to their detriment, that promotion is all of marketing. We won't let you make that mistake. 

Place: how do you get your products to your customers? We'll examine the difference between the two main distribution channels: direct and indirect. We'll also discuss the direct-to-consumer (D2C) model and consider how our choices around distribution should be guided by your core competencies.

We close our masterclass by looking at examples of best-in-class technology tools to assist you with with diagnosis, strategy and tactics.