The Marketing Strategy Model session is all about creating a solid strategic position based on what your ideal Customer wants in your product or service and not simply want you want to tell them most. It’s all about focusing on the one or two most important benefits you can deliver AND are important to that customer and not trying to include everything you do. It’s also about developing a tightly focused Strategy first and then, and only then, can we work on Tactics that support that strategy. Way too often businesses jump to Tactics first, and what seemed like a cool marketing idea falls on its face because the Target Consumer (if identified) didn’t seem to care.
So how do you know if your business needs a Marketing Strategy Model session conducted? Here are 7 signs:
- Something has changed with your Target customer. For example, let’s say a service company that has focused on Commercial business wants to grow the Residential side, or vice versa. The decision maker has changed, the benefits they seek have changed, and the competition has changed making it time to reanalyze your marketing strategy.
- Your Target is the same but their buying motivations and criteria have changed.
- New competition arrives or something has changed with one or more of your current competitors.
- You do not have a marketing position or strategy that helps you make focused marketing decisions. Decisions are made based on gut feeling or some other mechanism.
- You have a marketing position or strategy but it doesn’t seem to work.
- Your marketing position or strategy seems okay but further analysis might make it better.
- You have trouble answering questions about who your Target is, what they want from companies like yours, what’s driving purchasing decisions, and your Target’s perceptions of your competitors.
What is a Marketing Strategy Model Session?
I was explaining to a client earlier today what it means to be a “Certified Facilitator” for a process called The Marketing Strategy Model. He was interested in what one of those sessions looks like and if it was worth an hour and a half to two hours of his valuable time to work through one of these sessions with me. Of course, 5 to 6 figure advertising campaigns failing because of a lack of a Marketing Strategy versus one and a half hours of upfront planning for a successful campaign is a no-brainer, but I digress.
The session is all about creating a solid strategic position based on what your ideal Customer wants in your product or service and not simply want you want to tell them most. It’s all about focusing on the one or two most important benefits you can deliver AND are important to that customer and not trying to include everything you do. It’s also about developing a tightly focused Strategy first and then, and only then, can we work on Tactics that support that strategy. Way too often businesses jump to Tactics first, and what seemed like a cool marketing idea falls on its face because the Target Consumer (if identified) didn’t seem to care.
The model itself, being just 5 Steps, is beautifully simple. However, its the nuances of how to extract, interpret, place, and even get rid of some of the information that makes a facilitator so valuable.
The 5 Steps of the Marketing Strategy Model:
- TARGETING
- BENEFITS SOUGHT
- COMPETITIVE PERCEPTIONS
- POSITIONING
- ADVERTISING & PROMOTIONS
During the session we usually get through #3 or #4 because there are several directions to go to develop the Advertising & Promotion. Before jumping into the 5 steps I’ll first explain the difference between Marketing Strategy and Marketing Tactics and the pitfalls of moving straight to Tactics. We’ll then go through a quick exercise to illustrate how the Model is alive in everyone’s day to day purchase decisions. Then we start analyzing your business according to the model!
TARGETING
Targeting certainly seems easy on the surface. We want to get a really good description of who makes your best customer for a specific product or service you are focused on. The tough part for a business owner or manager is to get rid of the “everyone is my customer” mentality. We must focus on the most important, and likely, consumers to do what you want them to do.
The Targeting segment goes way deeper than what you might be used to. Sure, we will talk about Age, Sex, Gender, Income, etc but we will also go into Lifestyle, Psychodemographics, and much more to start creating a real life-like profile of who this person is.
BENEFITS SOUGHT
This is the “what do they want when coming into the market for this product or service” part. It’s about getting inside their mind to find out what’s important when deciding where to shop or what to buy. We’ll create a list of all the factors of this decision. Think about how you go through this process when purchasing everyday products or services. When thinking about where you went for lunch yesterday what did you think about? Were you busy and SPEED was important? Trying to lose weight and HEALTHY OPTIONS was important? Taking an important business partner along and needed a place with PRIVATE SEATING? Your customers go through this same process!
We then spend time arranging this list in order of priority in terms of the Target. It’s starts to get obvious at this point why ad campaigns fail. What if your campaign is based on the eighth Benefits Sought out of a list of ten. You just spend a bunch of marketing dollars advertising a Benefit that no on cares about!
COMPETITIVE PERCEPTIONS
This part is usually the toughest for a business owner. It’s important to put pride aside and be completely objective here. We will analyze the previous list of Benefits Sought in terms of what you can deliver AND what your competitors can deliver. We’ll plot the results on a grid we term the Strategic Gameboard and it’s here the model really starts to come to life!
POSITIONING
Often we’ll save this step for later but sometimes we’ll get into it on the spot. Looking at the Strategic Gameboard we will start to see Benefits Sought that your business can deliver on better than your competition. These Benefits Sought are where we’ll start the conversation of what Position you should own in your marketing. We judge a Position with 3 main criteria:
- Is it Significant? This is easy to judge by how high the benefit was ranked on the gameboard. If it was #2 we can judge it is probably important to the Target. Alternatively, if it ranked #7 it’s likely it’s not a very important Benefits Sought and likely won’t be a Significant Position.
- Is it Unique? Again, we can look at the Gameboard. You may do really well with an important Benefits Sought but look at where you compare to your Competitors. If everyone owns it too, it’s not Unique!
- Is it Credible? Is it believable that you could own this to the Target? Think about Wal-Mart trying to own a Position of high quality or BP trying to own a Position of environmental stewards. You get the picture, you actually have to be able to deliver and it has to be believable.
ADVERTISING & PROMOTION
Unfortunately most business and advertising representatives start here without going through steps 1 through 4. However, as marketing dollars become more scarce and accountability of those dollars becomes more important it is key to go through the steps to create a campaign that doesn’t just contain Tactics but has a solid and focused Strategy behind those Tactics. We don’t usually go into this step during the session because often times we want a little time to digest what the model has told us and we also usually want to get more people stakeholders involved in the ideas. Might I suggest a Brainstorming Session!
Is a session like this worth your time?
