Something is changing in the world of Marketing. Companies, professionals, and directors are changing. And if they are, it’s because the market has changed. But has it really? Has the industry not known how to read between the lines? How long has it taken us to understand that the most accurate approach is the one that puts us on the customer’s side?
Development of strategies based on the product, on the weight of promotional campaigns, and on the design of the proposition, have achieved important negative milestones: an extreme saturation from advertising, high percentages of customer loss and an extreme weakness in Marketing departments, which continue to lack the weight they should have on the board of directors of large companies. When the old ways don’t work, the fault goes to the old standbys, those who design sales plans and those in charge of sales.
However, companies don’t have to get lost in the search for responsibilities. While they’re doing it, there are hundreds, or even thousands of customers who have tired of waiting for answers, and look for them in the competition. The solution becomes a complete change that allows us to reorganize and put Marketing where it should be: driving the corporate growth engine.
Now more than ever it is imperative to organize the sales strategy around an unavoidable series of steps: "P + S + T". That is to say, "Positioning, Segmentation, and Targeting". We must know how to prospect the market; we must know what our natural place is in the customer’s mind, which customers we choose and what investments of resources and effort we gear towards them. The Marketing and Sales department should not take on the challenge by themselves. The entire organization must be involved in a strategy that requires team work, because it revolves around the customer, not the product. Faced with this need to design new propositions with unpredictable results, we must opt for differentiation. The customer is not a robot; they have criteria and resources to evaluate what is being offered to them, they know what their needs are, and, most importantly: they have plenty of choices.
It’s no longer enough to divide consumers according to their purchasing power. Speaking of lower, middle, or upper class is insufficient. It doesn’t offer us anything. Tastes and motivations, culture, socio-economic context, geographical position…all of this plays a fundamental role in the definition of new customer profiles that change and are renovated as our society changes. For example, “multi-customers” are emerging now; those who use different services and need a single entity to communicate with; “hybrid customers” who go from habitual spending on low-price products to a taste for occasional luxuries; “immigrants”, whose weight is progressively greater in western society, but who continue to have strong links with their countries of origin, etc. Classical segmentation techniques no longer work; we have to opt for new models.
New Marketing opts for the customer to the greatest extent possible, and the reason is attributed to the growing weight of intangible ingredients in the evaluation of companies. The action’s value is very similar to the customer portfolio value, and that’s not by chance. Both elements go hand in hand because the future profitability of a company will depend on the medium and long-term life cycles of their customers.
Let’s not turn our backs on customers, as successful as our products may be.
Try making a 180º turn, and change your point of view.