Customer Value-Driven Marketing Strategy: Creating Value for Target Customers
Customer Value-Driven Marketing Strategy
Designing a customer value-driven marketing strategy involves two primary conceptual questions: Which customers will be served? and How will they be served?
The goal of this process is to create more value for the served customers than competitors are able to provide.
The process is divided into four major steps:
Segmentation: Dividing the total market into smaller segments of buyers with distinct needs, characteristics, or behaviors that might require separate marketing strategies or mixes.
Targeting: Evaluating each market segment's attractiveness and selecting one or more segments to enter.
Differentiation: Differentiating the market offering to create superior customer value.
Positioning: Arranging for a market offering to occupy a clear, distinctive, and desirable place relative to competing products in the minds of target consumers.
Market Segmentation
Geographic Segmentation: Dividing a market into different geographical units, such as nations, regions, states, counties, cities, neighborhoods, population density (urban, suburban, rural), or climate.
Demographic Segmentation: Dividing the market into segments based on variables such as:
Age and life-cycle stage: Offering different products or using different marketing approaches for different age and life-cycle groups.
Gender: Dividing a market into different segments based on gender.
Income: Dividing a market into different income segments, such as affluent or low-income consumers.
Other variables include occupation, education, religion, ethnicity, and generation.
Psychographic Segmentation: Marketers divide the market into different segments based on:
Social class.
Lifestyle: Products people buy often reflect their specific lifestyles. For example, Panera caters to a healthy-eating lifestyle segment that seeks food that is both good-tasting and beneficial for health.
Personality characteristics.
Behavioral Segmentation: Dividing a market into segments based on consumer knowledge, attitudes, uses of a product, or responses to a product.
Occasion segmentation: Dividing the market according to occasions when buyers get the idea to buy, actually make their purchase, or use the purchased item.
Benefit segmentation: Dividing the market according to the different benefits that consumers seek from the product. For instance, Schwinn produces e-bikes specifically to make morning commutes or rides around town easier.
User Status: Segments include nonusers, ex-users, potential users, first-time users, and regular users.
Usage Rate: Segments include light, medium, and heavy product users.
Loyalty Status: Consumers can be loyal to brands, stores, or companies.
Segmenting Business and International Markets
Business Markets: Use many of the same variables as consumer markets but also include:
Operating characteristics.
Purchasing approaches.
Situational factors.
Personal characteristics.
International Markets: Variables for segmenting across borders include:
Geographic location.
Economic factors.
Political and legal factors.
Cultural factors.
Intermarket (cross-market) segmentation: Forming segments of consumers who have similar needs and buying behaviors even though they are located in different countries.
Requirements for Effective Segmentation
To be useful, market segments must be:
Measurable: The size, purchasing power, and profiles of the segments can be measured.
Accessible: The market segments can be effectively reached and served.
Substantial: The market segments are large or profitable enough to serve.
Differentiable: The segments are conceptually distinguishable and respond differently to different marketing mix elements and programs.
Actionable: Effective programs can be designed for attracting and serving the segments.
Market Targeting
Evaluating Market Segments: A firm must look at three factors:
Segment size and growth.
Segment structural attractiveness.
Company objectives and resources.
Target Market Selection: A target market consists of a set of buyers sharing common needs or characteristics that the company decides to serve.
Targeting Strategies: Strategies range from broad to narrow:
Undifferentiated (mass) marketing: A market-coverage strategy in which a firm decides to ignore market segment differences and go after the whole market with one offer.
Differentiated (segmented) marketing: A market-coverage strategy in which a firm decides to target several market segments and designs separate offers for each. Marriott International uses this by operating more than differentiated hotel brands to capture a larger market share.
Concentrated (niche) marketing: A market-coverage strategy in which a firm goes after a large share of one or a few segments or niches. American Giant uses this for its back-to-basics, made-in-America apparel niche.
Micromarketing: Tailoring products and marketing programs to the needs and wants of specific individuals and local customer segments. This includes local marketing and individual marketing (e.g., ordering custom M&M's with a personal message via mymms.com).
Choosing a Targeting Strategy: Factors to consider include company resources, product variability, product’s life-cycle stage, market variability, and competitors' marketing strategies.
Socially Responsible Target Marketing: Marketing should be done to serve both the interests of the company and the interests of those targeted. Concerns often arise when vulnerable or disadvantaged consumers are targeted with controversial or harmful products.
Differentiation and Positioning
Product Position: The way a product is defined by consumers on important attributes—the place the product occupies in consumers' minds relative to competing products.
Positioning Maps: Marketers prepare perceptual positioning maps that show consumer perceptions of their brands versus those of competing products on important buying dimensions. For Large Luxury SUVs, dimensions include price and luxury-performance orientation.
Example brands on the map include Lexus LX570, Infiniti QX80, Toyota Land Cruiser, Cadillac Escalade, Lincoln Navigator, and Land Rover Range Rover.
Price points on such maps can range from to thousand dollars.
Choosing a Strategy: The differentiation and positioning task consists of three steps:
Identifying a set of differentiating competitive advantages on which to build a position.
Choosing the right competitive advantages.
Selecting an overall positioning strategy.
Competitive Advantage: An advantage over competitors gained by offering greater customer value, either by having lower prices or providing more benefits that justify higher prices. Differentiations can occur via product, services, channels, people, or image.
Differences to Promote: A difference is worth establishing if it satisfies several criteria:
Important: The difference delivers a highly valued benefit to target buyers.
Distinctive: Competitors do not offer the difference, or the company can offer it in a more distinctive way.
Superior: The difference is superior to other ways that customers might obtain the same benefit.
Communicable: The difference is communicable and visible to buyers.
Preemptive: Competitors cannot easily copy the difference.
Affordable: Buyers can afford to pay for the difference.
Profitable: The company can introduce the difference profitably.
Value Propositions
The full positioning of a brand is called the brand’s value proposition—the full mix of benefits on which it is positioned.
Winning Value Propositions:
More for more: Providing the most upscale product or service and charging a higher price to cover higher costs.
More for the same: Offering high quality at lower prices.
More for less: The best winning proposition, though difficult to sustain long-term.
The same for less: Giving a good deal on familiar brands.
Less for much less: Meeting consumers' lower performance or quality requirements at a much lower price.
Positioning Statement: A statement that summarizes company or brand positioning using this form: To (target segment and need) our (brand) is (concept) that (point of difference).
Example: Public Goods is positioned as an online food and household goods retailer that makes healthy, sustainable, everyday essentials accessible at a fair price for value-, health-, and convenience-seeking buyers.
Communication: Once a position is chosen, the company must take strong steps to deliver and communicate the desired position to target consumers. All marketing mix (4Ps) efforts must support the positioning strategy. Positioning must be monitored and adapted over time to match changes in consumer needs and competitors' strategies.
Strategi pemasaran yang berfokus pada nilai pelanggan bermula dengan dua soalan utama: Siapa pelanggan yang akan dilayani? dan Bagaimana mereka akan dilayani?
Tujuan proses ini adalah untuk memberikan lebih banyak nilai kepada pelanggan berbanding pesaing.
Proses ini terbahagi kepada empat langkah utama:
Pemisahan Pasaran (Segmentation): Membahagikan pasaran kepada segmen-segmen kecil dengan keperluan atau ciri yang berbeza.
Sasaran (Targeting): Menilai setiap segmen pasaran dan memilih satu atau lebih segmen untuk dikejar.
Pembezaan (Differentiation): Membuat tawaran yang berbeza untuk memberi nilai pelanggan yang lebih baik.
Penjenamaan (Positioning): Menempatkan tawaran di tempat yang jelas dan diingini dalam fikiran pelanggan berbanding produk lain.
Strategi pemasaran yang berfokus pada nilai pelanggan bermula dengan dua soalan utama: Siapakah pelanggan yang akan dilayani? dan Bagaimana mereka akan dilayani? Tujuan proses ini adalah untuk memberikan lebih banyak nilai kepada pelanggan berbanding pesaing. Proses ini terbahagi kepada empat langkah utama:
Pemisahan: Membahagikan pasaran keseluruhan kepada segmen-segmen kecil pembeli dengan keperluan, ciri, atau perilaku yang berbeza yang mungkin memerlukan strategi atau campuran pemasaran yang berbeza.
Sasaran: Menilai daya tarikan setiap segmen pasaran dan memilih satu atau lebih segmen untuk disertai.
Pembezaan: Mengubah tawaran pasaran untuk mencipta nilai pelanggan yang lebih tinggi.
Penjenamaan: Mengatur penawaran pasaran untuk menempati tempat yang jelas, berbeza, dan diinginkan berbanding produk pesaing dalam fikiran pengguna sasaran.
Setiap langkah ini penting untuk memastikan pelanggan merasa puas dan terlayani dengan baik oleh produk dan perkhidmatan yang ditawarkan.