This document discusses the key concepts and pillars of marketing including the 4 P's of product, price, place, and promotion. It outlines the marketing process of market orientation, segmentation, targeting, positioning, codes, touchpoints, and communications. The document provides tips for working effectively with marketers such as sharing goals, adding an analyst, and not getting distracted from long-term strategies.
There are probably as many definitions of what marketing is as there are commentators but my favorite is this one: the art and science of getting and keeping customers. I’d like to spend just a minute talking about this because it’s really easy to think art = creative and science = data or analytics. My view is that the art and science reference is more about the approach to thinking in the various elements of marketing: good marketing should be scientific in its approach – campaigns are engineered, creative has more logic than you realise and of course with the increasing volumes of data available to us through DMPs, DSPs and CDPs, algorithms and analytics models play a bigger role that ever before. But room should always be left for magic – or art – to happen. The serendipitous, last minute inclusion of a channel in a campaign, the excitement of an analyst uncovering a compelling insight or the unexpected outcome of a focus group. The art speaks to us not being master of all we survey but perhaps at the mercy of a butterfly
We have a confession – in Australia, marketing and marketers are abit shit
Tonight we’re chatting through how marketing and product work together – if we go back to the fundamentals of marketing – or Neil Borden’s 4Ps – then we share the same roots. Marketing today is often reduced to the communications department
Sales Orientation – All customers are good for the business, we don’t really need to understand them we just need to sell to them, the more products the better, marketing is sales support Marketing = Sales and revenue is everything – example car companies
Product Orientation – we make amazing products, we lead the market and customers will follow, Marketing = Education example is 3M (Post-it note invented by accident)
Advertising Orientation – Marketing = Communications is often spin and one-way comms – retail in australia
Market Orientiation is the prime directive for marketers – the bring the customer to the organization
Organizational Orientations
Market Orientation John Narver Marketing Professor Quote: Market Orientation is a business culture committed to creating superior value for buyers through three combined behaviours: customer orientation, competitor orientation and inter-functional coordination. Research suggests that businesses that are more market oriented enjoy higher profit margins, superior sales growth, greater retention and new product success.
A market orientation is a business culture in which all employees are committed to the continuous creation of superior value for customers. However, businesses report limited success in developing such a culture. One approach to create a market orientation, the approach taken by most businesses, is the “programmatic” approach, an a priori approach in which a business uses education programs and organizational changes to attempt to implant the desired norm of continuously creating superior value for customers. A second approach is the “market-back” approach, an experiential approach in which a business continuously learns from its day-to-day efforts to create and maintain superior value for customers and thereby continuously develops and adapts its customer-value skills, resources, and procedures. Theory suggests that both approaches contribute to increasing a market orientation. It also suggests that when the a priori education of the programmatic approach is sharply focused on providing a foundation for the experiential learning, the combined effect of the two learning strategies is the largest. The implication is that the two strategies must be tailored and managed as a coordinated joint strategy for creating a market orientation
Market orientation – the art of understanding the customers in the market. Research, focus groups, data. When you signed your contract for your job and walked through the doors you lost something forever and that was the customer perspective – you are now trying to answer questions and everything is skewed through that lens: is the price too high or low, this feature is amazing, is my ad abit shit? Segmentation – market segmentation is the process of dividing the total market for a good or service into several clusters which are homogeneous (or similar) within the group and heterogenous (or different) from those in other clusters. This is more that demographics, attitudinal, firmographic, behavioural. Avoid averages – 2 testicles
Targeting is picking the segment your going to chase – lots of debate in this area: micro targeting, traditional targeting, sophisicated mass marketing, mass marketing (eBay example for micro, in market targeting)
Positioning – how are you orienting yourselves to the target? No one right answer – is it about purpose, differentiation, distinction. Essentially it is what place is the brand, product, service occupies in the minds and emotions of your customer?
Codes – what codes or brand assets are you going to use – important part of marketing as this accesses the memory structures of your customers
What touchpoints will your customers interact with you through?
And finally – your campaign
3M example – glue that didn’t work 6 years later Arthur Fry in church
What kind of marketers are you working with – tactical, comms and colouring in department – try and drag them up the process chain. Otherwise…..
My observation over 20years of marketing is to build a relationship – it’s much easier to work with, to disagree with and to collaborate with someone you like. So spend time over coffee getting to know your marketer and that time will return to you multiplied. Product and Marketing should be joined at the hip – we’re two halves of the same coin
Building a relationship helps you both navigate the differences and create an infinity loop between your areas where one feeds the other – customer perspectives/feedback/intel that can be debated, product features that can be embraced and enhanced, product positioning
If your aiming for downloads and marketing are chasing impressions then you’re not going to have a fun time. Have a common goal, a common plan
Burger King in the US have a long running strategy of stunt marketing – sending customers through a McDonalds drive through to get a $1 burger, an AR app that burns McDonalds ad or a “ceasefire” for international World Peace Day. As an olive branch, Burger King proposed the McWhopper, an amalgamation of the brands’ most popular burgers to be sold on that day with all proceeds going to non-profit charity Peace One Day.
Despite Burger King’s heartfelt open letter in both The New York Times and The Chicago tribune, as well as a compelling short ad featuring the founder of Peace One Day, Jeremy Gilley, McDonald’s snubbed the proposal. This move earned McDonald’s a lot of criticism, but Burger King a huge surge in social media interaction and impressions.
This PR stunt was the brainchild of Y&R New Zealand and the agency won a number of awards for its effort, including the Grandy at the 52nd International Andy Awards.
Noone loves the product as much as you do. Noone loves the marketing at much as the marketer does. What matters are the results and a shared drive for results is, in my opinion, the key to the two teams working most effectively together