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“A brand vision should attempt to go beyond functional benefits to consider organizational values: a higher purpose, brand personality, and emotional, social, and self-expressive benefits.”
“A brand vision should attempt to go beyond functional benefits to consider organizational values: a higher purpose, brand personality, and emotional, social, and self-expressive benefits.”
The 4 P's of the Marketing Mix are related to each other in the Brand Positioning you want to create: luxury (slow, expensive, high quality) vs. generic (fast, cheap, undifferentiated). Your decision will depend on the market size of your customer need, the innovativeness of your solution relative to the competition, and economic conditions, market maturity, size and other outside forces affecting it. In general, it is easier to position innovations as luxury products, with higher prices and margins, more visible sales channels and big marketing campaigns. Wile it is difficult to position a generic product as luxury, it is possible and usually very expensive (think consumer packaged goods).
Product
Product
Remember that your customers are buying satisfaction, not just parts or technical details. Deliver it to them in a manner that serves what they need, when they need it, how they must use it and why it solves their problem (known or unknown). Also understand and capitalize on your package as part of your problem. Must your package protect the product? Does it deliver convenience (where or how it's consumed)? Does it inform the consumer about the level of quality and how to use it? Does it reinforce your brand?
Price is the most powerful of the four P's of the marketing mix, for it can elevate or sink a brand when incorrectly applied. Your pricing objectives should match your brand positioning goals, along a product and market life-cycle timeline. You may have to reduce price or increase promotion as the market for your product matures. Here it's good to have new products in the pipeline (we introduced a dozen new items a year, across 4 product categories). You must also take trade and legal considerations into mind when establishing your price policies. Your sales channels deserve their profit if they earn it by doing a good job promoting and selling your product - and it's your job to help them do so. To do this, we placed free-standing displays in hundreds of stores.
Price
Price
Place
Place
Where and how will your product sell best? Do you need a multi-tier distribution system (such as cigars in cigar stores)? If so, your price structure must reflect the distributor / retailer margin. You should also understand the sales and marketing work that margin provide you, and encourage / support that. Do you sell direct to consumer (like a software product)? How will you communicate and deliver that? We had a saying, "make it easy to do business with XIKAR", applicable to both retail customer and consumers (warranty). Consider them your partners in delivering and enjoying your product solution and you will gain great loyalty.
Promotion
Promotion
The goal of advertising and promotion is to inform, remind and persuade your target market, ultimately to purchase your product / service. For greatest impact, speak directly to your target audience. Promotion includes publicity, advertising and marketing promotion. Of these, third-party unpaid news and features of your product or company is the most powerful, because people trust independent opinion as social proof (see below), particularly from reliable sources. Provide your trade and the general press with regular updates, news and information about your products. You may also consider writing informative articles for the press.
Consumer testimonials, now widely gained (good or bad) via Yelp and Google, can be an extremely powerful incentive to purchase your product (or not). Encourage and curate these. Answer complaints quickly, openly and compassionately to show the public your commitment to them. Indeed, I believe testimonials, and the warranty / service behind them, are the key to XIKAR's brand marketing success. Click here to see a selection of testimonials received over the years.
Traditional advertising and also social media should follow the AIDA rule: get attention, interest, decision and action to buy. This needs a strategy aligned with your Mission and brand positioning, and above all, must be authentic to them. At XIKAR we published. product "hero shots" to capture attention and added short, humorous or thought-provoking text for greatest and memorable impact. Frequency is equally important as content, for the best ad / social media post won't have impact in a sea of them.
Objectives
Objectives
Often, new product brands will enter a market with a profit margin objective, establishing itself in a luxury / innovation position. Doing this successfully requires new solutions to customer needs and clear segmentation of potential customer sales channels (such as cigar retailers in XIKAR's case). Sometimes companies will use a penetration (low pricing) model to gain market share, whether to capture market power to increase margins later, or to capture market share for a public offering as we have seen in the tech space. As the product and market mature, "maintenance" pricing strikes a balance between profit objectives and keeping or gaining incremental market share. At XIKAR, we used a "Value" strategy to enter the market and grow our brand, by providing a unique innovation, better materials and cool product at a price at or just above our competitiors. We then increased prices through line extensions with luxury materials or new functions.
Considerations
Considerations
Sales discounts can deplete your brand's position and pricing power as customers become accustomed to the newly established prices. However, certain trade discounts, such as cash discounts, and wholesale or distributor pricing are necessary to distribute and sell your product through those channels. You may also offer marketing promotions as "allowances" through those sales channels. Be sure you publish your price lists, with clear definitions of types of trade partners and corresponding allowances and quantity discounts. This will help you avoid angry customer calls or worse, legal ramifications associated with unfair trade practices, price fixing and discrimination. Be sure to discuss pricing with a qualified attorney before publishing! Check out McCarthy's chapter on Pricing in Essentials of Marketing for a great summary of these considerations.
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