Finding the Way to Tap Consumer Desire
Filed under: Brand Leadership, Executive Marketing Strategy
Marketing advances product innovation by being the catalyst across an organization’s sales, operations, and product development functions to offer customers products that satisfy desires. In developed economies product marketing is not ‘need based’ but desire driven. For example, soap buyers want to know if it does more than just clean, they also want to know that it has deodorant, scents, etc.
Desire creates the opportunity for innovation and evolution of products and services. Today’s desires become tomorrow’s needs as the basic standard of living improves. The telephone evolved from the 19th century as a luxury-invention to become a basic household necessity in the 20th, and by the turn of the 21st became the mobile communications standard.
What’s the difference between companies that focus on selling units versus companies that sell value in customer relationships? For example, what’s different about Apple’s phenomenal success with the iPod and the MP3 players from Creative Labs, and numerous others that were first to market years earlier?
Companies like Apple link marketing to their business objectives in a way that leads and drives customers to shift from a need staple to must have cachet or brand consumers aspire to. There’s value that transcends the consumer’s rational view of an item to a more emotional state of demand for a branded product with consumer value and importance typically higher than the unit’s price point.
By contrast what value has the American automotive industry promoted with low employee pricing and rebates? They drive transactional unit sales at any cost and discount the value of their car brands so that the main reason to buy becomes price. This is a downward revenue and profitability sales spiral that subsidizes the industry in the short run but which in the long run destroys its economic value and consumer relevance.
Consistently successful companies e.g. Pepsi, P&G, Apple, Nike, Intel, BMW represent a group that understand how to deliver big ideas that build continuous selling relationships to promote value at higher margins. These companies typically stand apart and outperform their category because they are able to focus on two key in-balance factors: Vision balanced with Pragmatism (or mission), and Leadership balanced with Teamwork.
Vision shapes the relative merits and possibilities of a company’s products to the target consumer. Vision evaluates how the company’s product projects itself to the person who buys it; understands the elements of the product that tap into the consumer personality and response to motivate consumption.
The big idea communicates the clarity of the vision. The consumer sees it in the advertising and product experience. To move forward a vision must resonate with the team that creates the marketing if it’s to communicate well to external stakeholders. The vision is not realizable if not balanced with pragmatism.
Pragmatism is grounded in simplicity and rationalism so that the product makes sense to the consumer. While vision is the broad view of some future realization, pragmatism helps to define the product for the consumer in the here and now. If a consumer can be forward thinking in adopting a new product while avoiding the ‘bleeding edge’ moniker of experimentation and possible recklessness, then there’s a big idea to building sales velocity through the wider market.
Leadership guides across an organization to help it rise above the banal and uninspired. Leadership maintains the focus on the vision as the team develops their marketing concepts. Communication of what is possible is essential to create the buy-in among the team members so that their energies and creative talents will produce the big idea that consumers will care about.
Teamwork executes the big idea by understanding the combination of vision, pragmatism, and leadership. It’s in the team that the idea is given life and possibilities. The members are the sounding board for each other. They evaluate the original vision against their ideas to determine the difference between consumer aspiration and meaningless selling.
The team is where multi-disciplined talents combine to produce the marketing concept with salient and novel communications that sell.
When all four elements are in balance, then Big Ideas are realized to deliver customer satisfaction, personal reward, and company success.
Peter Klinge Jr. is a Principal with OneAccord & can be reached at Peter.Klinge@OneAccordPartners.com. This is an excerpt from the Big Idea Series from Peter Klinge. © MMV Peter Klinge. All Rights Reserved.
Photo by goodrob13
