Marketing 101: Selecting An Overall Positioning Strategy - Value Proposition

There are buzz words and phrases in marketing & branding that seem to have an "aura" or "mystery" revolving around them.  There are also phrases and words that people who have careers in marketing don't understand at all.  One of the most used terms in existence is the Value Proposition.  Yet, so many of my colleagues don't really know what one is, or how to use it.  So let's spend some time defining it and exploring what it is and how you use it.

What Is A Value Proposition?
Simple question, right? Yet...it's a bit of a complicated answer. So if I'm going to define this as simply as possible, I'm going to say it like this: A Value Proposition is the full positioning of a brand, product or service.  If I were to expand on the definition, then I would say that a Value Proposition is the full mix of benefits that the brand, product, or service is differentiated and positioned upon.  A Value Proposition answers the question: "Why should I buy this?"

Above is a fairly standard illustration of the matrix of Value Propositions.  On the top, we have three Price categories: More, The Same, and Less.  On the side, we have three Benefits categories: More, The Same, and Less.  So when we assemble a Value Proposition, we are pairing a level of Benefit, with a level of Price.  For example, I may choose to take a More for the Same approach, meaning I'm going to offer more features and benefits than my competitors, for the same price.

The combinations in the matrix that are green represent the most favorable approaches to take with your Value Proposition.  Those in red are rarely profitable, and tend to lead to problems or a loss of focus down the road.

Let's begin exploring some of these categories of Value Proposition.

More For More
When we tout a "More For More" value proposition, we are telling the consumer that we are providing them the best possible product or service, and we are charging a higher (some would say "premium") price to cover the costs of giving you the "best".

In the real world, it is easy to see who the "More For More" players are.  One of my favorites is Apple.  They are not shy about "More For More". Apple gives you the best design, the best quality, the best experience, at a price that meets their corporate goals for gross margins and profits.  When a company truly stands behind this value proposition, giving the consumer a premium product, with premium service and an experience that is consistent over time (the Macintosh has been around for 30 years), then it can be very successful.

In order to compete in a "More For More" market segment, you are going to have to find a product or service category that is under-serviced.  If there is a void in the market segment for a premium product, and if the market segment has consumers that can afford a premium product, then you can consider moving in to that area.  However, there are cons to following a "More For More" value proposition.  When you have a premium product, there will always be imitators that will produce a similar product or service, and claim that it has the same quality for a lower price.  Amazon has been marketing it's Kindle Fire HD as a higher quality, lower priced alternative to Apple's iPad Air tablet.  "More For More" brands, products and services will always be under fire by those who use a "More For The Same" or "The Same For Less" value proposition.

More For The Same
How do you counter a "More For More" competitor?  You present a "More For The Same" value proposition.  A "More For The Same" value proposition entales offering a product, service or brand with comparable quality, at a lower price.  Depending on the costs associated with producing your product or service, you may have the same margins as a "More For More" competitor, or you have have smaller margins, which you are hoping to make up for with a higher volume of sales.

What does "More For The Same" look like in the marketplace?  The auto industry is a great example. Lexus, Infinity, Kia and Hyundai are perfect examples.  Lexus and Infinity were the first to attempt to uproot major luxury "More For More" brands such as Mercedes, BMW and Cadillac.  Offering more car, for the same (and usually lower price), these brands were able to take away more and more market share. As a result, Mercedes and BMW realized that there were more customers available at lower price points.  More recently, Hyundai and Kia have followed the same approach, introducing their Genesis and Cadenza models to the marketplace.  However, "More For The Same" can fail, if you are not backing up your value proposition with the quality and features that you claim you are providing the consumer.

The Same For Less
Probably the most powerful Value Proposition is "The Same For Less". Why?  Because we all love getting a great deal.  Great product?  Lower price?  Yes please!  Need a high quality PC for less?  Get a Dell.  Need great quality food, clothes, and electronics?  Go to Costco.  Want door busting deals on name brand electronics?  Go to Best Buy or Fry's Electronics.  Need name brand groceries for much less?  Go to Winco.  You get the idea.

Less For Much Less
If you remember my discussion of social and economic groups, then you know the reality of the consumer: few people want, need, or can even afford the very best products and services.  As a result, there will always be a market for value products.  "Less For Much Less" is summed up with a definition of "offering a brand, product, or service of less quality, for a lower price".   In most cases, the reality of a consumer's monthly budget forces a consumer to stick with "needs" over "wants" during the buyer decision process.

This means you are going to provide a lower "performing" product (less quality and features), at a much lower price.  This also means that you are usually relying on a higher volume of sales to make up for much lower margins.

More For Less
I'm going to briefly touch on one Value Propositional tactic that we see fairly often in the marketplace.  "More For Less".  That's what we all want, right?  More features, more product, more value, for a really low price.  We typically see "More For Less" when a new brand is entering a target market with established players.  Many claim to offer "More For Less" today.

At first it's easy to do.  You are ripe with new investment capital, or you are a large company that has just budgeted a large amount of money towards a new product segment. So you market your product, and sometimes sell it at a loss, offering more features, for a better price.  However, over time, it becomes very hard to maintain a "More For Less" value proposition.  Companies will typically fall into this trap: losing focus.  With each new generation of your product, you will add more features.  All of this product development, all of this marketing, costs money.  Lots of it.  And unless you have other products in your stable that are selling well and creating profits, you will have to raise the price of your product in order to cover the costs associated with bring it to market.  If you don't, you lose money.  Not only are you losing money, but your product and your brand become so "busy" and "cluttered", you begin to lose out to your competitors, who are more focused, and have a more focused product and message.  In essence, you eventually confuse your consumers, and once your prices go up, they look elsewhere during the buying decision process.  Stay away from "More For Less", unless you can keep your focus, and you can manage your bottom line.

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Marketing 101: Market Targeting

Recall that a customer driven marketing strategy consists of four distinct "steps".  Previously I focused on the first step: Segmentation.  I defined Market Segmentation as dividing a market into smaller groups that contain distinct needs, characteristics, or behaviors that may require distinct products, services and marketing mixes.  Because buyers have different wants, desires, needs, geographic locations, economic resources, buying attitudes, and buying practices, we use segmentation to divide markets into "pieces" that can be reached more effectively.  Market segmentation reveals our potential opportunities.  Once we have segmented the market, we must decide what parts of it to target.

Targeting the Market
We can define a Target Market as a set of buyers that share a set of common needs or characteristics that we can decide to serve.  When targeting a market segment we must look at three factors: a segment's size and growth trends, a segment's structural attractiveness, and our own company's long term objectives and available resources. The first factor consists of the type of research we have explored in the past when discussing Primary Data.  It is vitally important that we collect and analyze data on current segment sales, it's growth rates and potential profitability.  Once we have that data, we must compare it to the size and growth characteristics that our own company is seeking.

Next, we must investigate the segment's major structural factors that will determine how attractive our participation will be.  There are many reasons a segment may appear unattractive.  First, a segment is generally less attractive if it contains numerous strong and potentially aggressive competitors.  More competition usually results in many alternative products that create price competition and limit available profits.  Second, a segment is less attractive if buyers have more power, forcing participants to keep prices lower in order to increase market share, which also reduces  profits.  Third, a segment is less attractive if there are suppliers with strong influence in the micro-environments that actively try to hold material costs at a certain level, with increases our cost of goods, which also reduces potential profits.

Once we have produced a detailed evaluation of the target's structural factors, we must consider our own long term objectives and available resources.  Quite frankly, your company may not have the skills, knowledge, intellectual property and resources to succeed in a particular market segment.  A company should enter a segment only if they can offer outstanding value and can gain and retain competitive advantages over other companies in a given segment.

Choosing a Marketing Method
Once you have selected an attractive market segment, it's time to determine the marketing mix through a targeted marketing method.  Targeted Marketing is generally conducted at four distinct levels.  These levels are based on the relative size of the targeted segment.  In order of large to small, these levels are: Undifferentiated Mass Marketing > Differentiated Segmented Marketing > Concentrated Niche Marketing > Micro-marketing at a local or individual level.

Undifferentiated Mass Marketing
Undifferentiated Mass Marketing is a marketing strategy where a company chooses to ignore market segment differences (presented by their Primary and Secondary Data) and go after the whole market with one distinct product offering.  This type of strategy focuses on the most common needs of consumers, rather than on what is distinctly different between them.  This is a classic strategy from the early to mid-1900's, with the goal of appealing to the largest group of buyers possible in order to create as many sales as possible.  This is the classic volume-based tactic.  Product margins are low, and the value given to the customer is marginal as well.  Most modern marketers do not believe this strategy is very effective.  Today it is very difficult to make a product that appeals to mass-markets due to extreme competition from more focused niche products.

Differentiated Targeted Marketing
Differentiated Targeted Marketing is a strategy where we select several market segments, and design focused products and marketing mixes for each one, with the goal of higher sales and a relatively stronger position within each segment.  The advantage of Differentiated Targeted Marketing is that it typically gives a company higher gross sales across segments.  However increased sales also bring increased costs, because it can be more expensive to develop and produce 10 units of 10 different products (versions that are focused towards specific types of buyers) than 100 units of one product (for mass appeal or niche segments).  It also costs more to market for multiple segments, because each segment requires separate marketing research, analysis, planning, and channel management.  Due to these disadvantages, a marketer must weigh the prospects of increased sales versus the potential increased cost of business when choosing a differentiated marketing strategy.

Concentrated Marketing
Concentrated Marketing is a marketing strategy where a firm chooses to pursue a large share of one distinct segment or a few segments or niches.  Concentrated Marketing allows a company to achieve a stronger market position within a segment due to their greater knowledge of consumer needs and desires within that segment, fine tuning product features and prices over time in responsive to changing trends.  Concentrated Marketing is very appealing for companies that have relatively limited resources for product development and marketing.   Concentrated Marketing is also attractive, because segments are generally smaller and usually attract very few competitors, allowing for higher margins.  However Concentrated Marketing comes with higher than normal risks.  Because most of your business is focused within one or few segments, you may suffer large financial losses a segment turns sour at any time. 

Micro-Marketing
Micro-Marketing is a strategy where companies tailor products and marketing mixes to the needs and wants of specific individuals or local consumer groups.  Micro-Marketing generally involves consumers in all phases of product development, giving consumers opportunities to practice self-marketing during the buying decision process.  Micro-Marketing can give consumers extraordinary value, and can give the companies extraordinary value and consumer equity in return.  However Micro-Marketing tends to increase product development and marketing costs by reducing natural economies of scale inherent in manufacturing.  Micro-Marketing is also logistically complicated due to the numerous requirements of executing different regional and local marketing mixes.

Once you have evaluated and chosen a segment to target, we must work on Differentiation: differentiating the market offering (ie: the product) and thereby creating superior customer value.  I will explore this topic in my next post.

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Marketing 101: Post-Purchase Behavior

So far I've examined four of the five stages of the Buyer Decision Process: Need Recognition, Information Search, Evaluation of Alternatives, and the actual Purchase Decision.  We've discovered that each stage is complicated, and that marketers will need to understand their customer's journey as they construct meaningful campaigns and messaging.  These statements are even more important to reckon with in the last stage of the Buyer Decision Process: Post-Purchase Behavior.

What is Post-Purchase Behavior?
Simply defined, Post-Purchase Behavior is the stage of the Buyer Decision Process when a consumer will take additional action, based purely on their satisfaction or dissatisfaction.  The consumer's level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction is directly related to the varying relationship between their initial expectations of the product (pre-purchase), and their perception of the actual performance of the product (post-purchase) in their hands.

If after the purchase the consumer perceives the product's performance as matching their expectations, or even exceeding them, they will be "satisfied".  If their perception of the product's performance is less than their expectations, then the consumer will feel "dissatisfied".  The larger the gap between their expectations and the product's performance, the more dissatisfaction.  This dissatisfaction leads to Cognitive Dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance is buyer discomfort caused by post-purchase conflict resulting from dissatisfaction.  The reality is that all purchases, big and small, will result in some degree of Cognitive Dissonance.  This is always the case, because every purchase a consumer makes involves some sort of compromise, however small or minute.  Since consumers form beliefs and attitudes early in the Buyer Decision Process, at some point they will be concerned about having a negative experience with the product they may chose, or potentially missing the perceived benefits of other competing brands.

The issue of Cognitive Dissonance raises an important question: Why is it so important to satisfy the consumer?  It all comes back to our basic definition of marketing: Managing profitable customer relationships.  The goal is to attract new customers through superior value, and to keep growing customers by delivering customer satisfaction.  If we are doing these things, then we will be able to capture value from customers to create profits and build customer equity.  So, if our customers are satisfied they will begin to develop brand loyalty.  This brand loyalty will help us develop profitable relationships.  Our satisfied customers will buy from us again. They will become influencers in their cultural and social groups.  They will pay less attention to competitors, and buy more of our products. 

Dissatisfaction breeds the opposite.  Consumers that perceive poor product performance will not create profits and will erode customer equity.  They will not be loyal, and they will become negative influencers in their cultural and social groups, leading others away from our brands.  What should we do with dissatisfied customers?  We should pursue them.  Even if they do not want to buy our products, we can still target them with dedicated messaging.  We can directly reach out to them, and we can figure out ways to repair the relationship.  These consumers can provide us with a wealth of primary data that can be used to improve our offerings and create focused marketing campaigns.  Dissatisfied consumers are just as valuable as satisfied ones.

The conclusion is clear: Our job is not done once the consumer buys our product.  Once a consumer buys a product they will enter some degree of post-purchase behavior.  These behaviors, based on their satisfaction or dissatisfaction, will either build customer equity and brand loyalty, or lead to eroding sales and brand image issues.  This all is related to their relationship between their expectations and the perceivced performance of the products in their hands.  As marketers, we must have messaging ready for this specific part of the Buyer Decision Process.  It is our job to encourage happy consumers to share their experiences and dive deeper into brand offerings.  It is also our job to be brand advocates by reaching out to dissatisfied consumers and transforming their experience into one that leads to a profitable relationship.


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Marketing 101: The Buyer Decision Process - Information Search

In my last posted I started to discuss the Buyer Decision Process.  Simply defined, it's conducted by a consumer before, during, and after the purchase of products and services. The process consists of five defined steps or stages that typically occur in a certain order: Need recognition > Information Search > Evaluation of Alternatives > Purchase Decision > Post-Purchase Behavior.

Need Recognition refers to the instance where a consumer recognizes that a need or problem exists that needs to be satisfied.  Need Recognition is usually triggered by an internal stimuli when a particular need, such as hunger or thirst, rises to a high enough level to become a drive.  Once the need has been identified and has become a drive, the pursuit of information begins.

Information Search
Information Search is the second stage of the buyer decision process.  In this stage consumers are driven (by their drive) to search for more information related to their need.  If the drive is strong and a satisfying product is near at hand, the consumer is likely to buy it then, barely collecting any information, or skipping this stage altogether.  If the drive is not strong, the consumer will usually store their need in memory and begin an information search.  As a consumer does more research they will inevitably become aware of competing brands and products that are available for purchase. 

Appliances are a product category where consumers conduct lots of research and there is ample competition.  Let's say a consumer needs to replace their refrigerator.  Because the most effective sources of information tend to be personal in nature, a consumer might start their information search by asking members of their friends and family social and cultural groups what refrigerators they would recommend.  Next, the consumer will typically begin to use commercial sources of information to "fill in the blanks", such as advertisements, editorial reviews, and in-store sales staff.

Marketers must design their marketing mix to make target customers aware of their brand in the midst of all of this "noise".  Ad messaging must address the typical needs, lifestyle aspirations and answer the common questions of their target demographics.  Sales staff must be properly trained and incentivized so that in-store touch points are as successful as possible.  If a marketing mix is properly created, it can help accelerate consumers quickly past the Evaluation of Alternatives stage and towards the Purchase Decision.


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Marketing 101: The Buyer Decision Process - Need Recognition

Over the past few months we've spent the majority of our time exploring the many ways consumers are influenced throughout the buying process.  First was an overview of Consumer Buying Behavior, which we placed into the Model of Consumer Buyer Behavior.  We summarized that [1] Consumers "ingest" marketing and other stimuli, such as the four P's: Product, Price, Place and Promotion [2] the stimuli enters their "buyer black box" [3] the "black box" creates buyer responses.

Next we looked at Cultural Factors affecting consumer purchases, noting that Cultural Factors are some of the strongest influences of consumer buyer behavior, because they are the set of basic values, perceptions, wants and behaviors that are "learned" by a consumer from their families and other important social institutions.  Also recall the fact that we need to remember that every group or society has a culture influencing them in some form or degree.

Along with cultural factors, there are also Social Factors affecting consumer buyer behavior.  Human beings are social, and they need people around them to interact with and to discuss various issues in order to reach better solutions and ideas.  We learned that these social factors typically consist of the consumer's small groups, their family, and their social roles and status.  We also learned about social roles such as Initiators, Influencers, Deciders, Buyers, and Users.  These roles play a part within social groups consisting of friends and familes.  We also quickly examined how economic status enables or disables a person's abilties as a consumer.

On top of the social factors affecting consumer buyer behavior, we also have Psychological Factors.  The consumer's own personality is constructed by the unique psychological characteristics that create relatively consistent, lasting behavior in response to their own environment.  These characteristics include Self Concept, Motivation and the five motivational needs, Perception, Learning, and Beliefs and Attitudes.  In summary, all of these factors and stimuli illustrate an important point: consumers are complicated.  Now let's see how complicated reaching a buying decision can be.

Defining the Buyer Decision Process
The Buyer Decision Process is conducted by a consumer before, during, and after the purchase of products and services.  Purchasing decisions are usually considered to be psychological constructs, because although we never "see" a decision, usually we infer from observed behaviors that a decision has been made. Therefore we are able to conclude that a psychological event, the "decision", has occurred. This assumption of a process suggests a commitment to action; that commitment to buy.

The Buyer Decision Process is usually split up into 5 distinct stages that typically occur in a certain order: Need recognition > Information Search > Evaluation of Alternatives > Purchase Decision > Post-Purchase Behavior.  This order seems to suggest that a consumer will pass through all five stages, however this is not always the case. Often with habitual buying behavior a consumer will usually skip or reverse some of these steps in the Buyer Decision Process.  However one step, Need Recognition, is never skipped.

Need Recognition
The first stage of the buyer decision process is Need Recognition.  Need Recognition refers to the instance where a consumer recognizes that a need or problem exists that needs to be satfisfied.  Need Recognition is usually triggered by an internal stimuli when a particular need, such as hunger or thirst, rises to a high enough level to become a drive.

External stimuli can also create a need and lead to drives.  For example, advertisements that consumers hear and see, or discussions with other people can cause them to consider buying a particular product.

When preparing a campaign and settling on your target audience, you need to conduct research that helps you define the needs of the consumer, how the needs arose, what stimuli brought them about, and how that stimuli led the consumer to determine they needed your product.

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