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Sunday, June 21, 2009

Marketing, advertising, consumer behavior and BOS, a new business perspective

In most business operators, cost savings is the mere important words to them and they have found to have misinterpreted it. In many interviews that I have made, cost saving is done until it effects hiring highly paid skill operation personnel, advertising, promotions and some even reduce the expenses on having a qualified accounts personnel.

The idea of not budgeting for advertising or proper promotion has been an absolute idea. The Gurus of Marketing; Philip Kotler; mentioned in many of his speeches and his marketing books, the importance of marketing, understanding consumer behaviors in business today.

Actually marketing could be run from the cheapest way by having e-marketing and the expensive marketing exercise which is on air marketing in TV or media. The other expensive exercise of marketing is the billboards advertising. Millions of people would will ‘catch and retain’ the informative or persuasive marketing done through this type of marketing.

Steven Scot, described in his book, “A millionaire’s note book”, on how he make a full benefit from the short TV advertisement in market and selling his first product; later own American Telecast Corporation and Groups of Consumer Goods Companies.

Steven used to mentioned on of his success trade that is understanding “The Law of Building: Don’t start building the house until you’ve laid the foundation.” From here he further mentioned, 2 (two) main steps to be taken as the action plan.

First, asking logical questions about our product and our offer:
- What are all the benefit associated with our product?
- How does my product relate to our consumer’s 2 greatest motivations – desire to gain
and fear of loss?
- How can we raise the perceived value of my product without significantly raising the price?
- In the perspective of cost of goods, cash flow, competitive price; how could we offer pricing,
payments terms, rebates, volume discounts, and so forth to our consumers?

Second, asking ourselves logical question about our consumer:
- Who is our primary consumer and what percentage does he or she represent?
- What are the primary and secondary motivations for our consumer to buy this type of
product?
- What objections or excuses might this consumer use to delay or avoid a buying decision about
this product?
- What are the answers to all this objection and objections that we could offer?
- Who is your secondary consumer?

In my teaching of Blue Ocean Strategy to some groups of students I always remember the Three Tiers of Non-customer who are actually customers.
Tiers 1: “Soon-to-be” noncustomers who are on the edge of our market, waiting to jump ship.
Tiers 2: “Refusing” noncustomers who consciously choose against your market.
Tiers 3: “Unexplored” non customers who are in the markets distant from yours.

From above we could see that Steven blend his question within, market segmentation, consumer behavior, advertising and the marketing mix. He might have used the marketing analysis tools to find his answers.

According to BOS (Blue Ocean Strategy), companies always forget the huge noncustomers. These noncustomers are in three tiers and they represent giant latent demand of customers. The challenge is how to convert them into a customer.

Combining all the knowledge of segmentation, marketing mix, advertising, consumer behaviors and relate them with Blue Ocean Strategy we are then able to meet the challenge on converting this huge latent demand into huge number of customers. Adding the capabilities of relation marketing, we are then having the large numbers of loyal customer.