The art of marketing focuses on market segmentation: defining customer groups that are similar enough so that the same products or services are attractive to them. Marketers usually segment the market according to the following criteria: product category, price level, demographic analysis of individuals or companies as consumers and consumer psychology analysis. With so much energy invested in market segmentation, why do product promotion strategies based on these categories or market segmentation schemes fail repeatedly? In our opinion, the reason is that these strategies are analyzed based on the characteristics of products and users. The market classification theory based on characteristics can only reveal the correlation between characteristics and results. Only when the marketing theory can provide a credible causal relationship and is based on the market classification scheme based on the environment can managers confidently judge the characteristics and functions of products. And market positioning can guide consumers to buy a certain product.
To make a predictable marketing plan, we need to know the environment in which consumers buy and use products. Specifically, consumers often have "jobs" that need others to complete. When consumers realize that they need others to complete a job, they will look around for products or services that can be "hired" to complete the job. This is the life of consumers. Their thinking process is to realize that they have a job to finish first, and then use something or hire others to complete the task in the most efficient, convenient and low-cost way possible. The functionality, emotion and sociality of the work that consumers need to ask others to complete constitute the environment for consumers to buy goods. In other words, what consumers want to do or get constitutes market segmentation based on the environment. Companies that position products based on consumers' environment rather than consumers themselves can usually develop products that can achieve the expected success. In other words, the key content of market analysis is the environmental characteristics of consumers rather than their own characteristics.
To prove the above point, let's analyze the efforts made by a fast food restaurant to increase the sales and profits of milkshakes. In order to determine the characteristics of customers who are most likely to buy milkshakes, the marketing staff of this chain store classified customers from all aspects of behavioral psychology. Firstly, build the market according to the products, and then further segment the market according to the characteristics of existing milkshake customers. Both of them are market segmentation schemes based on characteristics. Then gather the consumers with these characteristics to discuss whether we can better meet their needs by making milkshakes thicker, enhancing chocolate flavor, reducing prices, increasing fruit particles and so on. Chain stores get detailed information about customers' needs, but the improvement of products has not significantly changed the sales and profits of products.
Then, a new group of researchers joined in to study the reasons why customers buy milkshakes. Their methods help chain store managers to see what traditional market research methods ignore. In order to understand the purpose of customers buying milkshakes, the researchers spent 18 hours in a restaurant, carefully counting the situation of milkshake buyers. They recorded the time of each transaction, what products the customer bought besides milkshake, whether the customer came alone or in a group, whether the customer finished the food in the restaurant or drove out of the restaurant, and so on. The most surprising discovery of this work is that almost half of milkshakes are sold in the early hours of the morning. The most common situation is that milkshake is the only food these customers buy, and they rarely eat milkshake in restaurants.
Then the researchers interviewed customers who bought milkshakes in the morning to find out why these people bought milkshakes and what alternative foods they would buy to achieve the same effect. Most customers who buy milkshakes in the morning have a series of similar purposes. They all have to go through a long and boring journey to work, so they need something to add some fun to the journey! At this time, they have "multi-task" requirements for food, and they are not hungry when they buy milkshakes, but they know that if they don't eat now, 10 will feel hungry. They are also subject to some restrictions: they are busy with work, always wear formal clothes, and can only draw out one hand at most.
When these customers are looking for food that can accomplish these tasks, sometimes they will buy bread, but bread will make their clothes and cars full of pieces. If the bread is covered with cream or jam, it will make their fingers stick to the steering wheel. Sometimes I eat bananas, but I eat them quickly, which can't solve the problem of boring journey. As breakfast, the restaurant also provides various sausages, ham or sandwiches, but these foods will make their hands and steering wheel greasy. Even if customers find time to eat sandwiches, the sandwiches will get cold by then. The results show that milkshake can meet the needs of these customers better than other available alternative foods. If the arrangement is reasonable, it takes 20 minutes to finish the milkshake with a thin straw, which is enough for a boring trip to work. You can eat milkshake with one hand, which is clean and there is no danger of spilling it. Compared with most other foods, you won't feel particularly hungry after eating milkshakes. Customers may be a little unhappy because milkshakes are not healthy food, but it doesn't matter because customers don't buy milkshakes to make themselves healthy.
The researchers found that at other times, parents usually give their children an extra milkshake after ordering the staple food. What do they buy milkshakes for? They are mentally exhausted: they keep saying "no" to their children as a whole. They just need to feel like reasonable parents. They appease their children with milkshakes, which are harmless to show that they are caring parents. However, the researchers found that milkshakes did not play an ideal role in this respect. They saw that their parents had finished their food, but the children were still sucking the thick milkshake stuck to the container wall, while their parents were waiting impatiently. Many milkshakes are only half eaten and thrown away because parents claim they have no time.
Market segmentation along demographic and consumer psychological analysis lines does provide information about individual consumers. But an equally busy father needs a sticky milkshake to kill time in the morning, and then he needs to buy other different things for his children. The researchers asked customers who were engaged in different jobs what functions of milkshakes should be improved, and averaged each customer's answers with those of other customers who belonged to the same demographic and consumer psychology segmentation field. The final result is a "four unlike" milkshake, which can't meet the needs of any customers.
Who does this chain restaurant compete with in the morning? Statistics compare their milkshake sales with those of their competitors. However, in the eyes of customers, the competitors of milkshake in the morning are all boring, such as bread, bananas and instant coffee. In the evening, the competitors of milkshake are biscuits, ice cream and things promised to buy for children in the future, hoping that children will not remember.
Knowing what a product can do provides operators with a clearer roadmap to improve their products in order to win real competition from the customer's point of view. For example, in order to alleviate the boredom and boredom on the way to work, chain restaurants can add real small pieces of fruit to milkshakes, so that drivers can suck crispy and delicious fruit pieces from time to time, adding an accident and expectation to the monotonous and boring road. Chain restaurants can make milkshakes thicker to extend the time allowed to suck. They can also set up self-service machines in each chain restaurant, and customers can use bank cards or coins to operate, so that they can fast-forward and fast-forward and reduce waiting time.
To finish the work at night, we need different products: low viscosity, fast digestion, small packaging and vivid decoration. This cheap milkshake can be attached to the children's set meal, so that when the children ask their parents, they can readily agree without too much consideration.
If chain restaurants implement those changes that really help to meet customers' needs and abandon those improvements that have nothing to do with customers' purpose of using products, this change will have obvious effects, but this is not by taking more existing market share from competitors or adjusting other products on the menu. On the contrary, this sales growth is achieved by striving for new consumption from other kinds of goods that consumers sometimes buy, and those goods can only give consumers limited satisfaction. Or, more importantly, products may find new growth opportunities among non-consumer groups. The world is full of standardized "universal oil" products, which can't meet the needs of customers satisfactorily, and the competition with non-consumption will often bring the biggest source of consumption growth.
Some people will say that the above example is too special and unrepresentative, and the traditional market positioning research method is still very effective in many aspects, so let's study a hypothetical case and see where the two methods will take us respectively.
At present, the intelligentization of mobile phones is a hot topic in the hot market. Every mobile phone manufacturer wants to add more functions to their products, so the functions become more and more powerful and complex, such as mobile phones with Internet access and mobile phones that can take pictures. Suppose there is a new mobile phone company called Jiaozi, which produces "Ace" mobile phones. Through its new function, people can easily receive mail in queues, waiting for buses, meetings and other environments, and gain a certain market share. So what's the next step? How does JIAO Subsidiary keep its trump card product promotion and performance growth track?
Of course, every month, a lot of fresh ideas about how to improve the next generation of ace products flood into the manager's office. What ideas should the company invest in and ignore? These decisions are very important. In this fast-growing market, they involve tens of millions of profit risks.
Jiaozi's managers may think that their market is divided by product categories, and in some people's words, it is "we compete in the field of handheld wireless devices". But if this is the case, they will find that Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung's mobile phones and dopod's mobile smartphones all use Microsoft's operating system, which is the trump card in the competition. In order to stay ahead of these competitors, Jiao's subsidiaries need to develop better products faster, because the competitors are very strong and are rapidly introducing newer and more powerful products. Does it mean that Jiaozi falls behind if she can't follow up hard?
According to the concept of defining the market by product characteristics, managers will have the idea that in order to win in the competition, coke subsidiaries need to add some functions to the next generation of ace products accordingly. Of course, the competitors of Jiao subsidiary also have the same idea: in order to stay ahead of all other competitors, all companies try to integrate the most prominent functions of competitors' products into their own products. What we are worried about is that market segmentation according to product characteristics will make the company eager to take the road of production standardization without differentiated products, and such products can't complete the specific work that customers may need it to complete.
Or the director of Jiao's subsidiary may segment the market according to the crowd, such as business travelers, and then add the product improvements made to meet the needs of these customers to the ace products. This kind of design makes coke subsidiary have to consider another set of completely different functional requirements design. For example, embedding customer relationship management software is considered to be very important, because it enables salespeople to quickly query transaction records and orders before contacting customers; Downloadable e-books and magazines can make customers no longer have to carry a briefcase full of thick and medium-sized books; Wireless Internet access services with the functions of changing travel reservations, stock trading and finding hotels through GPS may be very attractive. Software with the function of wireless transmission of cost report to headquarters seems to be essential. The increasingly huge development plan will delay the release of new products in the foreseeable future.
Every manager who participates in the market strategic positioning decision fully understands the pain and difficulty of answering such questions. No wonder many people think that the correctness of decision-making is as unpredictable as gambling, or even worse.
What if Jiao's subsidiary divides the market according to the tasks that people need to complete when using products? We haven't studied it in depth. Perhaps most of them just use it to kill small pieces of time that would be wasted if they didn't use it. In the long queue waiting for boarding at the airport, you may use the trump card to read the mail; What would the company managers do if they put the trump card that has been on standby on the table during the meeting? If the pace of the meeting is too slow or boring, he can glance at the news above, which is neither rude nor makes full use of time. If the pace of the meeting accelerates, he can put it aside and refocus.
What is the ace product competing with at this time? When people need to seize a small piece of time to do something, what products will they use if they don't use trump cards? Maybe they read the newspaper, sometimes they take notes, sometimes they casually look at the notice on the electronic display screen, or sit in a dull meeting with their eyes in a daze. From the point of view of consumers, these are the most direct competitors of the trump card.
Does this market framework mean that companies should improve their ace wireless e-mail platform? I'm afraid there are no Word, Excel or CRM. It is difficult to complete a series of activities, such as program introduction, changing mentality, working efficiently and reducing gear shift, in just a few minutes.
However, it may be a good idea for Jiao subsidiary to apply IVR interactive voice response technology, because receiving and replying voice messages is another effective way to use small blocks of time. Financial news headlines and stock index information can also be effective trump cards against newspapers; Simple single-player games or automatically downloaded news such as the ranking of the top ten elite athletes can eliminate boredom and gain market share. Looking at the market from the point of view of the work that customers need to complete when using this product, the new product development plan formulated by coke subsidiary can better reflect the real life of customers.
If Jiaozi defines her trump card products as small fragments to help people make full use of time, dopod defines her products as helping people to do things more systematically and methodically, and CDMA mobile phones as bringing more fun to young people, then these products will be different for consumers: each product will occupy a larger market share in the corresponding market. Because these products appear at different times and places in consumers' lives, we think that for a long time, most consumers will choose to own these products alone instead of using a single device like a panacea. In other words, unless there is a universal product, all these tasks can be completed without sacrificing functionality, simplicity and convenience, and the price is competitive.
Unfortunately, many manufacturers are trying to add the functions of competitors' products to their own products, so as to make all-round products with complete functions. If not controlled, this will lead to the similarity of products and the loss of their own characteristics, and as a result, even the original work can not be completed well. In fact, there is absolutely no need to do this. Dividing the market according to the characteristics of products and consumers, not according to the work to be done, will eventually lead to the self-destruction of products.