Dear All,
I'm happy to share with you the VIPs (Very Important Points) of a marketing mix!
- Product: needed/not needed - expected/unexpected
Purpose of marketing research and customer focus, as we saw earlier, is to understand the
customers' needs in order to deliver the right product. It is obviously risky and a waste of
money to develop products/features that are not needed by customers.
Point is that customers get used to a certain level of service or features. For instance a GPS
navigation device was a couple of years ago considered as a secundary feature of the car
but today drivers expect to have such a system when they buy a new car: GPS has become
a core feature. It is therefore important to understand among the needed features which one
are expected and which one can still "delight" the customer and help beat the competition.
- Price: right target and psychological price
When a product doesn't sell often the price is not the problem. It's probably just that we talk
to the wrong target, for which the product is not a "must have".
On the contrary companies often loose sales because they set up a price that is too low!
Each product has a psychological price and if you propose a product that is too cheap it
might seem suspicious to the customers (think of the impact of a cheap Porsche for
instance). The idea is to study the price elasticity in order to find the best combination
between the number of customers and the margin by customer.
- Place: from multichannel to crossmedia
Companies where struggling to give access to their products via various channels like
telesales, online store, face-to-face meeting and make all this consistent in CRM systems.
The point now is more to consider that a same customer will use several medias at the
same time - the cross media approach, where an email will lead him to a website and a
website to a shop thanks to a route planner.
The convergence of the different technologies - mobile, PDA, internet, Wifi - helps achieving
this crossmedia interaction with the customer in an easier way.
The challenge of media-planning is to find the smart interactions between the different
media/channels.
- Promotion: 6Ms of Wait Marketing
