Focus upon you as marketing genius
Let’s focus not upon the process of marketing and positioning, but on you. How should you 
become the best marketer you can be, even if you are a first-time entrepreneur or a seasoned CEO?
There’s an answer for that. The title of this insight helps us find a formula: LALA.
Memorize your use of “LALA”
Listen!
The first rule of marketing and positioning is to listen to the marketplace. Interview potential customers, hold focus groups, meet with existing customers. Hire consultants. Attend trade show education sessions. Ask you field representatives to debrief you about what they are hearing. But listen!
Adapt!
Create, change, throw out, tweak or put more resources behind those efforts or campaigns that are working. Listening does no good without action. And the first thing in marketing is to adapt your product or service to the needs of the marketplace.
Learn!
[Email readers, continue here…] Measure the results of your changed program in as many ways as possible. Create metrics for customer acquisition, retention, conversion, reach, or anything that helps you to better understand the effects of your changes to the program.
Adapt (again)!
It’s not unfair to reinforce the cycle by again adapting to the market after learning from your changes. Start the cycle all over again, and never stop.
LALA: Listen, adapt, learn, adapt.
This is why it’s so important for Marketing and Product Development to work together instead of in silos. Feedback from the marketplace, gathered by Marketing, Sales, CRM and all other customer touch points, should help drive product development and the subsequent adaptation of products to the realities of the marketplace when those adaptations become necessary.