Feh! v2

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marketing 101

Posted by Ian Holsman Sat, 27 May 2006 14:31:00 GMT

I’m sure not going to give this justice, but I thought there was a need to blog about this. This is just a summary of the marketing subject I did a while back.

first of all.. marketing is not just PR or advertising, although that is what most people think, by the time you hear about it the marketing is about over.

ok marketing starts by figuring out:

1. who uses / who do we want to use our thing
2. what our thing should be (the 4 or 7 P's you may have heard about)
3. how do we tell people about it in a way they will understand

who uses it? —-——

this is done via market research.

The aim here is to figure out how to group the people together by certain features they have. this could be:

- age / salary (demographic)
- lifestyle (physographic, yuppies, dinks etc)
- size of business (smb/fortune 500 etc)

these are called segments. each of these segments/groups have different requirements and ‘profit’ potential. The hard part in this is figuring out how to divide everyone up. Smart Marketing people are the ones who see similarities/groups where others don’t.

market research also determines what each group need/want. while each individual’s needs would be different, statistically there should be a commonality inside of the segment.

what our thing should be/the marketing mix —-—-—-—— your 2nd job in marketing is figuring out what features are important to each group / (or just the group you are interested in chasing). and mapping out how your product addresses each of these features (and how your competitors do it as well)

while we might suck at ease of use for instance, the segment we are ‘targeting’ don’t care about it.. but they do care about ease of integration.

this is usually divided into the 4 P’s (for a product) and 7 for a service

- Place
- Product
- Price
- Promotion

(and for a service the extra are)

- Process
- People
- Physical evidence

I’m not going to go into each one.. go google for ‘marketing mix’ or 4p’s for more info. I just want to say that Price is still important to OSS. it isn’t about the sticker price.. it’s about the total cost of ownership.

so marketing isn’t all about what features goes into the product, it’s about how you ‘position’ it in relation to others as well.

eg..competing product ‘F’ may have XYZ, but we know through our analysis that our group really only care about X and Z and have a unmet need W. so we design something around XWZ.

now in some cases just because people want something doesn’t mean we have to provide it either.. (eg low switching costs) especially if no one else is doing it.

how do we tell people about it?/communication ——- this is where PR comes in, but that isn’t the only thing.

communications is all about getting our message to the right people.

remember we are not after EVERYONE we are just after the people in that segment, and that we might have different messages to different segments.

this might involve mass-media advertising (pages in magazines that our segment read) or showing up in trade/developer shows, or going to a client’s workplace and giving a presentation to their executive staff, or even hosting a presentation at a conference saying why feature ‘W’ is so important (and being impartial never mentioning our product, knowing full well ours is the only one who does ‘W’ correctly) and why ‘Y’ is a waste of time.

This is why you sometimes see different ‘campaigns’ stressing different features. ie .. car XYZ is safe in someplace, and car XYZ is cheap/fun in others.

note.. this is not selling.. all marketing does is create/define a need within the certain group. Selling involves people showing how our product meets those needs.

anyway.. thats my understanding.. feel free to comment about how wrong it is.