What brands come to your mind if we ask you to name the most famous ones. McDonald’s? Coca-Cola? Maybe Apple or Samsung? What do these all brands have in common? They all solve customers’ problems. What’s the problem? Read till the end before choosing a marketing strategy and get acquainted with segmentation, market positioning, product packaging to imply them in your strategy.
The best marketing strategy
Once a group of students at a business university was to study a case. The case was the following:
There is medicine found to let AIDS patients live longer. This is a cocktail from 4 different medicine: people have to accept it constantly and it costs 40000$ a year. People have to use it till the end of their lives. Why is this medicine so expensive? Because the government gives companies the freedom to make researches on their own, using their own finances. If companies manage to find the pill, the government gives them 20 years of monopoly patent. This means the company that finds it can produce it. But what’s the problem?
- Lack of supplies?
- Companies’ profit?
- Maybe another company will start producing it?
These are some problems the students pointed out. But what is the real problem?
The problem is that the people are dying. So, you have to solve that problem.
Define the real problem! Solve the problem! No matter what your business does, ask yourself what problem does your business solve for customers.
For example, what problem does the famous Pedigree brand solve?
You may say feeding a dog, caring for a dog… But let’s go further. When do people buy a pet? First of all, pet solves the problem of love. But for a 20-year-old pet-lover student you should have a marketing strategy and approach that differs from one for a 65-year-old pet-lover.
We recommend startups use MVP to test their ideas and marketing strategy. Because of their shorter development time MVPs give early feedback and thus are optimal.
No matter what marketing strategy and approaches you choose, they should be human-centered. A human-centered marketing strategy is a key to a successful business.
Segmentation
Social media gives you the opportunity to define who is exactly your potential customer. You can’t target females from 18 to 65 years old from the same location and wait for results. You’re just wasting time and money: all you’re doing has nothing to do with marketing.
It’s impossible to target the entire market and hope for results. It’s a matter of time, huge costs, and efforts, but still doesn’t guarantee your business success.
You can get nowhere if you don’t know where you are going.
So you should divide the marketplace into small parts or segments. The process of dividing the marketplace into parts or segments, that may be interested in your business, or have problems your business solves, is the segmentation.
Segmentation is not only about the age, gender, and location of your audience. People of the same age, gender, and location have different interests, lifestyles, and personalities. 20-year-old girl Ann living in Berlin and having a pet differs from 20-year-old Ann who also lives in Berlin but doesn’t have a pet. Different people need different solutions and marketing approaches. So here comes segmentation and targeting to play a significant role in your marketing strategy. Here the testing process is unavoidable if you don’t want to fail and lose both money and time.
To diminish the risk of failure and capital loss MVP development is a smart approach.
How to divide the audience into segments
For dividing the audience into segments, you should understand who is your target audience. Forget about classical ways of segmentation. Instead, try to understand personalities.
“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.” Peter Sondergaard
When you have data resources you can divide them into segments and target each of them.
“Data are becoming the new raw material of business.” Craig Mundie
Once you identify a segment, you have to test whether it responds to your marketing actions and signs you send in the form of ads and promos. Reactions may be in the form of engagements and in this stage, you may find lots of interesting information.
When it becomes clear who is your target customer, you have to analyze how is the number of the segment going to grow, and calculate your profit.
Due to segmentation businesses are able to adapt their product to a customer’s specific needs, desires, uses, and financial capability. It enables marketers to focus their resources, money, time, and effort on a profitable, increasing market.
Market Positioning
After defining and exactly knowing what problem does your business solves, after defining who you are solving those problems for, you should fix your position in the market. What is positioning? When a lot of people have the same associations with the business, brand, or product, it is positioning. If there are no associations, there’s no positioning. It’s only up to customers to define your positioning. You can affect customers’ opinions and association, but your business will be what your customers think about it.
The ability to affect consumer perceptions of a brand compared to competitors is known as market positioning. The goal of market positioning is to develop a company’s or product’s image or identity so that consumers perceive it in a special way.
What comes to your mind first when you say McDonald’s? Burgers and fast food. That’s because McDonald’s company positions itself as the provider of fast food.
Another example is when a handbag company positions itself as a luxury status symbol.
Positioning Strategy types
Positioning strategies have several types. For example, you may position by:
- Price of the product
- Quality of the product
- Benefits and attributes of the product
- Specific use of the product
The main mistake businesses make in their marketing strategy is that they want to sell everything to everybody. But being everything means being nothing.
“The essence of positioning is sacrifice. You must be willing to give up something in order to establish that unique position” Al Ries
If you have a position, it means you have sacrificed something.
You should choose one direction: left or right. If you stay in the middle, nobody is going to remember you. Make people remember you.
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Oscar Wild
If the consumer doesn’t have any specific perception of your brand, you don’t have a position.
To show consumer perception of certain brands a perceptual map is used. Through this map, brands identify how competitors are positioned to explore their opportunities in the market.
Here’s an example of a perceptual map of consumers perception of price and quality in the automobile industry:
Product packaging
Every business and brand wants to differentiate. From the image below it becomes obvious that not all businesses try too hard though. But this is not the best marketing strategy to follow.
Source
Packaging design can range from simple to creative and complex one. Let’s have a look at the BMW box which is used as an influencer kit. The box contains a surprising finish inside. This dark and elegant packaging has an opening mechanism making this project look exceptional.
You open the box and make a decision. BMW company have understood when the clients make a decision: opening this elegant box.
It is FMOT: The first moment of truth. The term FMOT was coined by P&G in 2005. It takes only 3 to 5 seconds for a shopper to notice an item in a retail environment due to its package and make a decision to buy it or not. It is the moment when the client makes a decision.
So packaging should concentrate on that moment: on the exact time, the customer makes his decision.
For websites, online businesses the most important part of the packaging is UX/UI. Imagine you are determined to make an online purchase and the Payment section of the website is not correctly designed; you will abandon the website without making a purchase.
So this is only one case when packaging plays a significant role in your business.
To make your website and brand a unique one, don’t underestimate the design of your website.
You can’t impress your consumers with a slow-loading website with outdated web design.
Only high-quality web design can make your visitors engage your website.
Manvelyan Enterprises is a web development company experienced in creating responsive web applications and websites that meet both your business and consumer needs. As we are also experienced in MVP development services, we know which platform or architecture to choose and combine with the technology stack to develop an MVP for you.
If you are interested or have any questions feel free to contact us.