Marketing Strategies: 2ndSet

ClosedExplanation

The Centres in the Tree diagram are primary categories of commercial focus derived from the modes of engagement in the market.

Each Centre, epitomized in a 2-3 word phrase, refers to diverse business choices flowing from a set of interrelated principles. Understanding the approaches to interacting-for-benefit is therefore taken for granted. Channels between Centres define alternative and complementary business strategies as listed.

Much more detail can be found in marketing textbooks.

 

 

L3P Focus: Specific branded product
L3M Focus: Behaviours of target customers

Notes:

  • Advertising includes: media, trade shows, posters, sales support materials, &c.
  • Advertising must mesh with other strategies (e.g. promotional pricing is supported differently from brand development). Advertising designed as part of a consistent and coherent identity ends up enabling the company to own a word in the mind of the market (e.g. Hoover means vacuum cleaner; Volvo brings safety to mind).
L4B Focus: Customer expectations of price
L2B Focus: Comparative market strength of the company

Notes:

  • Lowest-price strategies may involve cost-reduction measures (in L1), but determination of price relates to what the market will bear and what competitors are demanding. Prices may even be used to dictate costs: especially when targeting critical price points.
  • High prices may be intrinsic to differentiation or leadership.
  • Selling at a loss and cross-subsidisation are common to support battles with competitors. Penetration pricing may be used to drive competitors out, but price-wars impoverish all.
  • Prices can be affected by using clout: with staff, with suppliers and with customers.
L4B Focus: Distinctive types of customer
L3M Focus: Specific market potentials

Notes:

  • Segmenting may be obvious (e.g. by territory or age) or it may require imaginative re-definition (e.g. by type of use, by quality, by keyword appeal, &c.).
  • Segmentation also demands differentiation of the product. For example, the aim may be to have multiple products for multiple segments or to target a particular segment (e.g. wealthiest, largest, &c.).
L4B Focus: Distinctive customer preferences
L3P Focus: Required product qualities

Notes:

  • Distinctive core product features are often intangible and incidental to function (i.e. based on shared fantasies). Customers assign high value to status, image and style, and are controlled by their mental associations.
  • Differentiation may imply a need for a segmentation strategy.

Originally posted: July 2009