Marketing

Buying is no longer about getting things we need. It’s about reinforcing a set of beliefs we hold and share. Marketing is not about finding new ways to sell more of something. It’s about affinity more than it’s about price—feelings more than facts.

A Simple Marketing Worksheet Who’s it for? What’s it for? What is the worldview of the audience you’re seeking to reach? What are they afraid of? What story will you tell? Is it true? What change are you seeking to make? How will it change their status? How will you reach the early adopters and neophiliacs? Why will they tell their friends? What wi

PERCEPTUAL MAPS For choosing specific benefits as POPs and PODs to position a brand, perceptual maps may be useful. Perceptual maps are visual representations of consumer perceptions and preferences. They provide quantitative pictures of market situations and the way consumers view different products, services, and brands along various dimensions.

Often a brand’s positioning transcends its performance considerations. Companies can fashion compelling images that appeal to consumers’ social and psychological needs. The primary explanation for Marlboro’s extraordinary worldwide market share (about 30 percent) is that its “macho cowboy” image has struck a responsive chord with much of the cigare

If we can identify that frustration, put it into words, and offer to resolve it along with the original external problem, something special happens.

We can examine competition from both an industry and a market point of view.7 An industry is a group of firms offering a product or class of products that are close substitutes for one another. ... Using the market approach, we define competitors as companies that satisfy the same customer need. For example, a customer who buys a word-processing so

When you’re the cheapest, you’re not promising change. You’re promising the same, but cheaper. The race to the bottom is tempting, because nothing is easier to sell than cheaper. It requires no new calculations or deep thinking on the part of your customer. It’s not cultural or emotional. It’s simply cheaper.

Here are five questions most likely to generate the best response for a customer testimonial: 1. What was the problem you were having before you discovered our product? 2. What did the frustration feel like as you tried to solve that problem? 3. What was different about our product? 4. Take us to the moment when you realized our product was actuall

Fundamentally, marketing must refocus away from selling product and toward creating relationship. Relationship buffers the shock of change. To be sure, the specific product or service provided remains the fundamental basis for economic exchange, but it must not be treated as the main event. There is simply too much change in this domain for anyone