Step Two describes the way to translate your
mission, vision, values and business culture
into a marketing communication strategy
and consumer friendly language.
Basically, the importance of understanding
your consumers and your market environment is highlighted once again. How to
achieve that? It is called research and monitoring.
In other words, you have to create and include a marketing communication strategy
in your business strategy.
Shaping a marketing strategy is a complicated process where many decisions should
be made and many factors should be taken
into account.
You might decide to brand your company as
an entity and simply embed your product
branding. This is appropriate if your products/services are more or less within one
product category (food and beverages for
example). If you though plan to sell IT services, wellness packs and soda drinks for example your strategy will be stronger if you
choose to brand each product/service separately.
Such decisions are also made based on considerations as target segment, expected
product popularity, etc.
If you plan to see both a cheap line of products and a luxury line you should consider
separate branding of those lines where your
company name is not being promoted. The
focus is on promoting the product line name
and characteristics.
Following the same line of thought, if you
expect one product to give much higher returns than your other products, it makes
sense to promote it specially. A possibility
there could be to use your one product’s
popularity to promote your other products
later on.
What you need to remember though, is that
marketing is not exclusively about promotions and selling. Marketing is an activity
meant to “sell” the company as such. That
means that what you are selling is a business
style, mission, vision, values, culture, CSR
and only then a product.
Many companies make the mistake of using
marketing as a superficial selling strategy.
They do it as this was the way business was
done in the 20th century. Consumers were
satisfied with buying
products and lifestyle.
The problem with such
a strategy is that consumers have changed their
attitudes and requirements.
Today we care about the environment, about human rights, about
starving children in Africa, about natural
calamity’s victims and war refugees.
As we are getting more and more satisfied
on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (see picture on next page) we tend to become more
caring and requiring.
For that reason you as a marketer need to
understand that understanding your consumer group’s behavior and opinions should
turn into crafting your business in a way satisfying your stakeholders’ desires and needs.
Follow the process step by step on the next
page.
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