How to design a marketing strategy effectively?

With the rapid development of the Internet, many misunderstandings have appeared in marketing in recent years. Once you fall into these misunderstandings, if you don’t think about them seriously, you will often be deeply trapped in them and unable to extricate yourself. In the end, it often leads to wasted work and continuing in the wrong direction.

What’s really scary is that because of these misunderstandings, what we may be doing every day is doing the wrong things better. Doing the right thing is often more important than doing things right.

So, what are some common misunderstandings in marketing that we have always overlooked and yet always believed to be correct thinking?

1. User Needs vs. User Tasks

People don't want to buy a 1/4" drill bit, they want a 1/4" hole.

Since when has user demand become a buzzword on the Internet? Product managers, marketing managers and operations managers all like to talk about user needs every day. Making products, writing copy, doing training and writing books all seem to require a lot of mention of user needs.

User demand has also become a strategy among many people, as if by doing so they can prove that they have a super user mindset.

Unfortunately, most of the time, people who talk about user needs every day do not really understand users themselves. Maslow's needs are also frequently applied by many Internet people to various product development, requirement documents, and copywriting.

Needs are everywhere, so such a concept must be too broad. Needs such as “I need to eat,” “I want to be healthy,” “I need friendship,” and “I need respect” can apply to anyone.

The need to eat itself is not enough to provide us with a reason to choose solution A over solution B, and it is not even enough to make us bring any solution into our lives, such as we may choose to skip a meal.

Demand itself is not enough to provide answers to all behaviors: we may eat even when we are not hungry for various reasons, or we may choose to eat at a nearby place because we are too busy at work, or we may choose to go to a high-end restaurant on a date for the sake of face.

Demand can only provide general guidance, but it cannot provide guidance when it comes to specifically determining what reasons will make users choose one product or service over another.

Whether it is market positioning, product development, growth strategy or writing copy, what we need is not a methodology that simply categorizes user needs or the problems they face, but the real key to understanding the reasons behind the choices users make.

Our view of the consumer has always been closely built around the concept of 'consumer needs' and our approach has been to define these needs through typical market research and then deliver on these needs.

So what is not user demand?

Only a clearly defined user mission can provide a guiding blueprint. This blueprint is very different from the concept of "demand" in traditional marketing because it is much more precise in its positioning of the problems that users are solving.

There are tasks that need to be completed in everyone's daily life. At this time, we need to purchase products or services to complete them in order to achieve progress.

A milkshake company hit a growth bottleneck, so they designed a consumer survey and peppered customers with questions: “Can you tell us how we could improve our milkshakes so you’d buy more? Would you like it cheaper? More chocolatey? Chunkier?”

The company made improvements to the milkshake based on all the feedback from users. As a result, the milkshakes became better and better, but neither sales nor profits increased.

Until finally they discovered through observation that almost half of the milkshakes were sold in the morning, almost all the people who came to buy the milkshakes were alone, they only bought the milkshakes, and almost all of them drove away to take the milkshakes.

It turns out that the real reason users buy milkshakes is that all customers have the same thing to do early every morning: they have to drive a long time to work, the road is boring, and they need to do something while driving to make the journey more interesting; they are not really hungry at the time, but they know that about 2 hours later, that is, between the morning and noon, their stomachs will growl.

So they buy milkshakes, and sip the thick milkshake through the thin straw, which takes a long time and basically can resist the hunger waves that come all morning. Morning tasks call for a thicker milkshake, which takes more time to finish during a long, boring drive.

In the afternoon, the users who made the purchases turned into fathers buying for their children. However, since the milkshake was thick, it often took a long time for the children to finish it, and the fathers often became impatient and threw away the half of the milkshake left in the children's hands.

In other words, users buy milkshakes to complete two different tasks. Once you understand this, it will be easy to improve the milkshakes. The morning "working" shake needs to be thicker so it takes longer to suck; and the afternoon shake needs to be handled completely differently from the morning one. It should be made half the size and less thick so that kids can eat it faster.

When we understand the tasks that users want to accomplish, we can design a marketing strategy more effectively.

• For the real estate industry: their business is not about building new homes but about fulfilling the task of relocating people’s lives;
• For the automotive industry: their business is not about building better cars, but about mobility, allowing users to move from A to B easily;
• For the catering industry:

It is important to note that we are not “creating” tasks, but rather discovering users’ tasks in a specific context.

By understanding this, we can change our perspective and redesign a marketing strategy. Such marketing strategies are not designed around user needs but around the tasks that users need to complete in a specific context.

2. Competition among peers vs. competition in other fields

Today, no matter what we do, we almost always have competitors in the same industry. When we write market research analysis, we are accustomed to analyzing competitors through comparisons of various dimensions, but this kind of thinking still looks at competitors from a self-perspective.

So how do we examine our competitors?

If we look at it from the user's perspective, we will find that many times, our real competitors may not only be in the same industry, but also come from other industries.

In the milkshake example, the user chose the milkshake on their morning drive because it accomplished the user’s task better than any other competitor.

From the user's perspective, other competitors include not only milkshakes from other chains, but also bananas, bagels, donuts, breakfast bars, smoothies, and coffee.

During the user's use, the banana will be eaten in a few bites and the user will soon be hungry. The donuts have too many crumbs, which will make the consumer's fingers sticky, causing them to dirty their clothes and steering wheels while eating and driving.

Bagels are mostly dry and tasteless, forcing drivers to smear cheese and jam on the bread while turning the steering wheel with their knees. All in all, milkshake is the best option.

By the afternoon, the milkshake's competition is no longer a banana, a chocolate bar or a donut; it's competing with the parent's later activities, such as shopping in a toy store with the child or making time for a game.

In the automotive industry, BMW realized that the real mission is mobility: getting me from A to B easily. BMW is indeed competing with traditional luxury cars, but it is also competing with Tesla, Uber, car-sharing platform Zipcar, Google's self-driving electric car development plan and even the future Apple Car.

In the specific context of the weekend, movies, playing games, watching TikTok, working out, and going to bars are actually all tasks that help users relax. At this time, the seemingly unrelated things become competitors.

For mattress manufacturers, when it comes to satisfying the task of sleep, its competitors include sleeping pills and any products or services that aid sleep. Re-examining competitive relationships and capturing key competitors can allow us to design a marketing strategy with greater breadth and depth.

3. Core User Share VS Market Share

Traditional concepts tell us that market share is extremely important, but because of excessive focus on market share, many companies, although they have become the number one in market share, ultimately cannot escape the fate of bankruptcy. There are countless such examples.

A few years ago, when Mobike’s market share was close to 60%, almost all experts believed that the shared bike landscape had been set and that Mobike had a bright future and would become the Alibaba of the e-commerce industry. In the mobile phone industry, we find that Apple phones rarely have the largest market share, but their market value is undoubtedly the largest, and their profits have always been ranked first.

A report by market research firm Counterpoint Research shows that in the second quarter of 2020, Apple's smartphone revenue once again ranked first, grabbing about 59% of the global smartphone industry's profits. Apple does not have the largest market share, but it continues to capture more than half of the industry's profits.

Why is this?

Because core user share is the key indicator of competition and an important competitive barrier.

4. User Grouping vs. Similar Tasks

When we do user analysis, we particularly like to classify users. Today, when we open the background of various software, we can see various classifications of users according to different age groups, behaviors, and characteristics. The various classification models are also dazzling and it is difficult to know where to start.

For example, a certain user is 27 years old, female, 1.70 meters tall, a white-collar worker in a company, earns about 10,000 yuan a month, and likes shopping. Unfortunately, these characteristics are not enough to explain why this female user wants to buy a product or service.

Many people know IKEA. IKEA's entire business model - shopping experience, store layout, product design and packaging style - is different from that of a standard furniture store.

Most retailers operate around a specific customer group or a category of products. They conduct statistical analysis on the customer base and classify various target customers, such as by age, gender, educational background, income level, etc.

Over the years, in the furniture retail industry, there has been Levitz Furniture, known for selling low-cost furniture to low-income people, and Ethan Allen, known for selling Colonial-style furniture to the rich. There are many other examples - there are stores that provide modern furniture for city dwellers, and there are stores that specialize in selling office furniture.

IKEA takes a completely different approach. Instead of organizing sales around special consumer groups or special product features, it helps customers complete a task based on their stage-by-stage needs.

Domestic companies such as Xiaomi and Pinduoduo have always been considered to be positioned in the low-end market, targeting the low-end population, but in fact, the reason why they have been successful is that they have completed similar tasks for various types of users.

Dividing users into groups based on similar tasks is often more powerful than dividing specific customer groups around a certain characteristic.

5. Product purchase time vs product use time

Sales and market data from the toy industry show that girls aged 7-12 will never play with dolls. Market research data from that year also showed that no one would be willing to use an Apple phone without a keyboard.

When analyzing data, most people focus on the user's purchase moment. For example, in the recent popular live streaming sales, almost all merchants are paying attention to the user's purchase moment and completely ignore the user's actual product usage moment.

A user may buy a product in a live broadcast room, but in fact the user may not actually use the product or may throw it away after using it once. In comparison, user usage becomes extremely important.

As an app, if the vendor simply tracks downloads, it's impossible to tell whether the product is doing a good or bad job of helping users make progress.

The starting point of the product purchasing process is much earlier than the actual purchase moment. If we can trace back to the moment when the first thought of purchasing the product appears, we can better understand the user.

A “purchase moment” may indicate that a product can handle a user’s task, but only a consistent series of “actual use moments” can confirm this.

When we need to design some marketing strategies, avoiding these misunderstandings can enable us to do the right things rather than doing things right.

Author: Escape

Source: Taoxuzi (ID: taoxuzi23)