Blog
The 4Ps of Marketing. RIP.
The 4Ps of Marketing There’s a lot of stuff out there about the 4Ps of Marketing. Fact is, the best thing to do with the 4Ps model is bury it. To borrow from the Monty Python team, “It is a late model. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life it rests in peace”. Let’s take a step back. The 4Ps of Marketing model – Product, Place, Price, Promotion – was created by Jerome McCarthy, a marketing professor at Michigan State University, in 1960. That’s a long time ago: the year that John F. Kennedy became President of the United States; a new band called The Beatles played their first gig, in Hamburg; and the Pentel Corporation demonstrated the fiber-tip pen. The business mindset back then was all about Products. In the September 2014 McKinsey Quarterly, in an article titled Redefining Capitalism, authors E...
What’s a Customer Worth? (A lot more than you think!)
Most businesses evaluate Customers exclusively in terms of their actual and potential spend on products and services. But many Customers are worth more. Some are worth much more. So it is important to understand which of your Customers fulfil the basic ‘money for product’ role with no desire for any involvement beyond that. And even more important to understand which of your Customers are willing to participate further. Customer as a Customer The basic Customer contract with which we are all familiar is where a supplier makes or sources a product or service and puts a price ticket on it. Prospective Customers then make the ‘product versus price ticket’ evaluation (often nudged along by some marketing activity) and either buy or don’t buy. In today’s parlance we can label this the Customer ...
Fresh thinking, energy and results at the Customer-Supplier interface
Value Genie helps businesses move from a product or service focus to a customer value focus. Our insights, tools and resources build customer value-led organisations: those that out-perform their peers by creating and delivering true value.
Which came first, the Product or the Customer Outcome?
Customer Outcome It is along towards ten o’clock one April evening in 1990, and I am sitting in a restaurant in west London with my friend John Frazer-Robinson – JFR for short. We went there for lunch and are now nine hours in to a lively conversation about the future of sales and marketing. (Total Quality Marketing[i] was published in 1991.) One of the topics we discuss is his theory of three generations of selling. I am immediately fascinated. It’s the genesis of an obsession with Customer Value Management that has stayed with me to this day. Value Creation =Customer Outcome All buying decisions (all decisions, in fact) are based upon Value judgements, where ‘value’ is an individual’s or group’s assessment of what something is worth, weighing the benefits of whatever is on offer against ...
Customer Value Creation
Customer Value Creation Customer Strategy development Customer Value assessment Value Proposition development Message development Collateral creation How do you feel about tackling every new day in your business? Is it exciting? Do you feel that you are building a great future, or just tinkering with the present? Do you feel that you’re positively differentiated in the eyes of your Customers, or just following along with the crowd? Where once businesses mass-sold products to mass Customer groups, they need now to focus on valued outcomes for individual Customers. This mega shift from product- and market-orientation to Customer-relationship orientation is, as they say, a whole new ball game. The fact that customers now have greater power and influence in the affairs of the companies that th...
(Customer) Satisfaction
Customer Satisfaction Back in 1965 The Rolling Stones unleashed (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, a protest against conformity, including the conformity demanded by the powerful mass marketing forces of the time: “When I’m watchin’ my TV And a man comes on to tell me How white my shirts can be But he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke The same cigarettes as me”[i] In the same year a business growth model was published that expressed and promoted that very conformity. Igor Ansoff’s famous Matrix synthesized everything down to just Products and Markets, resulting in four possible business growth strategies[ii]: Market Penetration = Existing Product in Existing Market Market Development = Existing Product in New Market Product Development = New Product in Existi...
Employee Value Creation
Employee Value Creation It goes like this. If the Customer is the Primary Value Focus of any successful company, those who work within the company must constantly be concerned to optimize the Customer Value that they help provide – and do so in a manner that is profitable for the company. It stands to reason that employees will only do this, reliably day in and day out, if they are engaged and energized, if they understand what is expected of them, and if they are trusted to get on with it. From the company’s perspective, what matters is speed of innovation and response, co-ordination of systems, and the ability to create synergy with Customers. In this environment, it is clear that decisions need to be made and managed dynamically, always closer to the customer in any transact...
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