Rodent-friendly brand name diamond studded mousetrap as used by you know who, only £2,500!
Many analysts of the marketing mix focus on the component parts and ignore the complex whole. The key point is the word "mix". It is perfectly possible to take separate decisions about each one of the four elements (product, price, promotion and place,) in such a way that each of them individually seems sensible, only to find that when put together they don't make any sense at all.
For example, consider a kilo of fresh Beluga caviar, offered for sale by your local cut price supermarket, with a garish "bargain of the week" sign on the shop window, at a price of £5. The product is well known for its high quality; the supermarket is a good down market outlet; it frequently promotes cans of fruit successfully this way, and the price would not be out of the way for a cheap family meal main course. The problem is not that any component of the mix is itself faulty; it is that collectively they don't make sense. Nobody believes that you can buy real caviar in your local supermarket at such a price, and even if they did, they couldn't credit the use of such a product as a loss leader. What are they going to say? Well of course it couldn't be real, could it? Not at that price? Not in that shop? If a man in a pub had offered to sell it to you at that price you would assume that it had "fallen off the back of a lorry"; in other words it was stolen goods. You don't really think your supermarket manager is a fence, but you do think he might try to pass off fake as real. What has happened is that the bad combination of elements of the marketing mix has produced sales resistance. Customers tend to believe that you get what you pay for, and that you know where to look if you are prepared to pay it. Take the same caviar; raise the price by a factor of 100; put it on the counter of a fashionable Knightsbridge delicatessen; promote it by discreet word of mouth to selected customers, and you would sell out. The key to understanding the marketing mix is not to look at the individual elements when forming a judgement, but to see how the elements relate to each other.
A better mousetrap?
Over a hundred years ago R W Emerson said that if you could build a better mousetrap, the world would beat a path to your door. He lived in the days of under-supplied markets and product orientation. To sell, all that was required was a reasonably good product. To be honest you didn't really need better mousetraps to make a comfortable living selling them; just a mousetrap that was as good as anyone else's. The difference between Emerson's day and today is simply that most markets in the West are now over-supplied. Competition allows the customer to be choosy. If you can’t offer him exactly what he wants, when and where he wants it and at the price he wants to pay, then he’ll find someone else who can. It’s no good telling the modern consumer that he can have any colour as long as it’s black.
Getting everything right
Marketing managers today have to get everything right; not just the product. The causal chain starts with the consumer’s need and flows through product design into market positioning. Needs are culturally rather than just physiologically defined. You cannot create a need that doesn’t exist, though you can certainly devise a new product that will satisfy a need that the customer may only have felt subconsciously. In modern societies the customer’s need may well be dictated by conspicuous consumption. Because we attach social status to the possession of material goods then our neighbour’s possession of them demands that we possess them too. The need becomes mapped on to a particular culturally defined object; the object is not needed for itself but for the image that it confers upon its owner. The image is part of the product that is purchased and successful promotion has helped to engineer that image. Do you believe that I couldn’t engineer an image that inferior mousetraps were now all the rage? Ask Sony why their technologically superior Betamax VCR bombed in the market place. Ask your teenage son why he insists on wearing jeans with holes in the knees or buys them already “distressed”.
Positioning refers to an attempt to influence the consumers' perception of the relative merits of a product and those of its rivals. It identifies a product in the mind of the consumer by comparison with the competition. It is important for a firm to create a clear and distinct identity for its product if it wishes to attract consumer loyalty rather than relying on casual or impulse buying. Positioning may be achieved by direct comparisons, provided that these are factually true. "Washes whiter," a famous promotional cliché, is a positioning claim that your product is more functionally efficient than your competitors'. In general positioning is achieved by stressing different elements of the marketing mix from those emphasised by competitors. For example down market positioning tends to stress price and value for money. Advertising is unpretentious and features down to earth characters. Up market positioning tends to stress quality or product features, and cultivates A / B social class images.
Positioning and the USP
Positioning is much assisted if the firm is able to establish in the public mind a unique selling proposition (USP). This means an aspect of the marketing mix, valued by the customer, that is clearly identified as belonging only to its total offer and not to those of its rivals. When you think of X plc, you think of Y unique feature. You cannot always choose any USP that you fancy. For example a small firm will not enjoy the economies of scale of its larger rivals, and will therefore be unable to challenge those who attempt to base their marketing on price. It will probably be obliged to develop emphasis on quality, or local distribution links. Some businesses are unable to develop a USP at all. They make do with comparative positioning such as "We are cheaper" or "We do the same thing, only better." Inevitably this is going to be less memorable for the customer. The positioning will be vague and harder to sustain in the face of competitive moves.
The ideal USP is one that helps the consumer decide that his need can be satisfied best by your product, in Arthur Kotler's words that the product has now been identified as a "want." Using SWOT analysis you work out what is your key competitive advantage and you focus all your energies on to putting that across to the customer. "Vorsprung durch technik," as they say in Germany. "As used by ...." as they say here.
© Philip Hall 2005
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