Archive for October, 2010
Saturday Morning Reads: With Great Choice, Comes Great Marketing Responsibility
Often when revenues start declining due to misfortunate business practices, a bad economy that slows consumer buying, or an increasingly competitive landscape the one thing marketers seem to lean on is the hope that developing new offerings and providing even more choice will save them.
Unfortunately (or fortunately for smart marketers), studies and books on buying behavior have make it abundantly clear that this inside-out, self-preservation mindset works against businesses and causes paralysis in customers more than it drives them to take action.
Ironically, the preference of having a lot of choice is what customers believe they want and need. If you are a customer-centric company (or trying to be), how can you balance the perceived wants and needs for variety with the psychological proof that “more is less?” It’s a responsible marketer that can practice customer advocacy and restraint.
strategy + business: A Better Choosing Experience
“…rather than helping consumers better satisfy their preferences, the explosion of choice has made it more difficult overall for people to identify what they want and how to get it. Thus, if the market for your product is saturated with choice, you can’t gain a competitive edge by dumping more choices into the mix. Instead, you can outthink and outperform your competitors by turning the process of choosing into an experience that is more positive and less mind-numbing for your customers. You can design a more helpful form of choice.”
[Thanks to Joe Ruiz of Strategic Marketing Solutions for sharing this article with the IMC chat group on Twitter. It was the impetus for today’s reading.]
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: Barry Schwartz, Buying Behavior, Customer-Centric, Marketing, Neuromarketing, Psychology, Sheena Iyengar | 
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Marketing 3.0: Electrolux’s ‘Vac from the Sea’
At any given time you’ll find me reading 3-4 books (fiction and business) at the same time. That might seem unusual to some people, but I read as I need information or have a new interest. Having a Kindle (and associated apps!) makes it really easy for me to jump between books too.
One of the books that I have been reading on and off is Marketing 3.0: From Products to Customers to the Human Spirit by Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya, and Iwan Setiawan.
The hierarchy of marketing as Kotler, Kartajaya and Setiwan see it is:
Marketing 1.0 – Product-Centric Marketing
- Objective: Sell products
- How Companies See the Market: Mass Buyers with Physical Needs
- Key Marketing Concept: Product Development
Marketing 2.0 – Consumer-Oriented Marketing
- Objective: Satisfy and retain customers
- How Companies See the Market: Smarter consumer with mind and heart
- Key Marketing Concept: Differentiation
Marketing 3.0 – Values-Driven Marketing
- Objective: Make the world a better place
- How Companies See the Market: Whole human with mind, heart, and spirit
- Key Marketing Concept: Values
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Marketers, It’s Time To Rethink Target Market Segmentation
Market segmentation as you know it has become more complicated today than ever before. Capturing data in CRM systems, doing primary research, etc. all help, but the ways of segmenting we’ve learned don’t allow you to see your customers in their natural space. Sure, sales, marketing and customer service teams capture a lot of information, but is it insightful? Is it useful in understanding the segment? Or is it just what ‘they heard’ and made a note of?
There is a lot of hype around social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., but the fact remains that social media (as a concept) is the first time that organizations have ever been able to see, listen to and get to know their customers in public spaces (again, in a ‘natural’ setting). Social interactions tend to be natural and not forced or coerced, which often leads to deeper insights.
Let’s look at all of the “-graphics” to get a better understanding of segmentation and how segmentation has changed.
Demographics & Firmographics
Ah, demographics and firmographics…the marketers tried and true methods of slicing and dicing their markets. We know them well, don’t we? They were drilled into our heads as marketing majors and have stuck with us through the years as the best practice for market segmentation.
But the days of mass marketing have come to an end and it doesn’t make sense to segment markets only to treat them as if they all live, think and buy the same way.
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: Data, Data-Driven, Demographics, Ethnographics, Firnographics, Market Research, Marketing, Marketing Analysis, Marketing Communications, Marketing Management, Psychographics, Segmentation, Social Marketing, Sociographics, Target Marketing |
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Saturday Mornings Reads: Fashion Centric
If there’s one industry where brands are in inextricable relationships with their customers, it’s the fashion industry.
Today, designers not only have the challenge of creating seasonal designs that create buzz and demand, but they now also need to stay on top of understanding the way fashionistas communicate and how they truly shop (hint: it’s not just about going to the mall any more).
I am far from a fashionista, but I do know that when it comes to social and mobile communications, the fashion industry has come a very long way. I joined my very first social networks (although we didn’t call it social networking back then) dedicated to a design house
—Hermès—back in 2004. There were thousands of women (and men) spending hours of time discussing their passion for Hermès. Everything from scarves to jewelry to perfume to leather goods (like the famous Birkin, originally called Haut à Courroies) to ready-to-wear consumed the daily conversation. We could tell you what year was the ‘Year of the River’ (2005, by the way), what scarf colorways and designs were the most popular for any given year, and the year of each of Jean-Claude Ellena’s perfume releases. Our passion gave us the advantage of knowing more about Hermès than most sales associates.
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: Customer-Centric, Fashion Marketing, Foursquare, Mobile Marketing, Social Media |
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How Audience Research Can Help You with Your Traditional Marketing Efforts
As traditional marketers, we have years of experience understanding our markets, what products and services they need/want, how to communicate best with them, and how they regard our brands, right?
Well, maybe not…
We have often relied on marketing research (primary or secondary), sales team feedback, customer satisfaction surveys, etc. to provide insights into those areas. The issue with most of those forms of feedback is that they tend to provide the answers we want to hear or find necessary to meet our internal business goals (either as an organization or a professional).
Audience research, on the other hand, uncovers specifically how markets use products and services, speak about them, form communities, etc. It’s like watching a pride of lions in their natural habitat. Regardless if it’s a B2B or B2C market, when we take the time to watch people in their natural – or comfortable – habitat, we will see their true behavior and opinions surface. If you haven’t done audience research, it can be quite eye-opening. But more importantly, it can’t be fabricated. As an organization it’s your choice to ignore it (at your peril, potentially) or to embrace what’s really going on in the market.
So how can audience research help traditional marketing efforts?
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: Analysis, Audience Research, Branding, communications, Customer-Centric, Data, Ethnography, Marketing, Product Development, Psychographics, Serengeti Communications, Service Development, Sociographics |
4 Comments »
The Harte of Marketing by Beth Harte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.theharteofmarketing.com. [If you have a question about what you can use from this blog, click on the above Creative Commons link to learn more.]
