The Building Blocks of Your Marketing Strategy
Defining brands and brand architecture
- Brand Definition:
- A brand is more than just a logo; it’s what your target audience thinks of your organization.
- Effective branding involves creating a specific customer service experience.
- Steps to Create a Valuable Brand:
- Awareness: Use attractive and consistent brand visuals to capture attention.
- Identity: Associate the brand with specific needs (e.g., BMW with luxury vehicles).
- Differentiation: Highlight unique features that set your brand apart from competitors.
- Performance: Ensure the customer experience meets or exceeds expectations to build satisfaction.
- Loyalty: Develop a habitual relationship with customers, encouraging repeat business.
- Brand Architecture:
- Umbrella Brand (Branded House): One brand for all products (e.g., Dyson).
- House of Brands: Different brands for different products (e.g., LVMH).
- Hybrid Models: Combination of umbrella and sub-brands (e.g., Porsche Cayenne, Marriott)
Choosing a business category
- Importance of Category: The business category defines the space where your brand competes for customers and is crucial for brand identity.
- Hierarchy: Companies belong to industries, which are subdivided into markets, and further into categories.
- Customer Perception: Customers naturally categorize brands and compare them to alternatives within the same category.
- Category Definition: Choose a category definition that highlights what you produce and the value you offer to customers.
- Exercise Tool: Use the category definition tool in the exercise files to explore different ways of defining your business category.
Investigating your organization and your competition
- Core Competencies: Unique skills and knowledge within your organization that are hard for competitors to imitate. These can include technical innovation, customer intimacy, or operational excellence.
- Functional Performance: Differentiates through technical innovation and high-performing products. Example: Dyson’s focus on industrial design and airflow engineering.
- Customer Intimacy: Differentiates through a service-oriented and flexible operating model, creating valuable customer relationships. Example: Four Seasons hotels’ emphasis on hiring, training, and problem-solving for customized service.
- Operational Excellence: Differentiates based on price or convenience through an efficient operating model. Example: Federal Express’s global logistics and reliable express freight delivery.
These competencies help align your organization’s strengths with its strategic assets and value propositions.
- Strategic Assets: Tangible and intangible resources like patents, brand reputation, and customer relationships that provide market value.
- Alignment: Successful brands align their core competencies with strategic assets and value propositions.
- Analysis: Before defining your brand and target customers, analyze your core competencies and strategic assets, as well as those of your competitors.
Developing a Practical Customer Defination
- Importance of Customers: Customers are crucial financial assets for any organization. They provide two levers for growth: acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones.
- Customer Acquisition vs. Retention:
- Acquisition focuses on new products and services that are easy to use.
- Retention involves improving existing products and requires different communication, pricing, and sales channels.
- Defining Customers:
- Use behaviors as the primary criteria for defining customers because behavioral data is easy to obtain and directly relates to profitability.
- Reserve the customer label for those who contribute to the company’s profitability through habitual relationships.
- Behavioral Criteria: Specify the behaviors that make someone a customer, such as purchase frequency and amount.
- Customer Beliefs: Consider customer beliefs as they impact the relationship’s success and retention rate. A high retention rate is a good predictor of long-term viability.
- Customer Stakeholders: In a B2B context, include all decision-makers:
- Formal buyer (negotiates and executes contracts)
- Payer (controls the budget)
- Direct user (uses the product)
- Final consumer (receives the product’s benefit)
- Influencers (staff consulted during the decision-making process)
- Managing Customer Relationships: Track key questions over time:
- Who plays each decision-making role?
- What are their motivations?
- What is their relative decision-making power?
- How much influence does your organization have over them?
- Should resource allocation be rebalanced based on these factors?
Navigating three types of customer loyalty
- Customer Loyalty: A win-win relationship between a brand and a customer, developed after multiple positive experiences.
- Types of Loyalty:
- Heart Loyalty (Emotional):
- Based on an emotional connection to the brand.
- Examples: Apple customers waiting in line for new iPhone releases, Mini Cooper drivers participating in group drives.
- Companies invest in customer intimacy, building relationships, personalized service, and fostering customer communities.
- Head Loyalty (Rational):
- Based on rational evaluation of the brand’s performance and price.
- Examples: Android phone users who focus on performance features.
- Companies invest in functional performance, innovation, and keeping customers informed.
- Hand Loyalty (Convenience):
- Based on habit or convenience.
- Examples: Loyalty to a nearby grocery store or consistently available brands.
- Companies invest in distribution, easy ordering, and logistics.
- Heart Loyalty (Emotional):
- Factors Influencing Loyalty:
- Business category: Higher loyalty in categories requiring significant financial or emotional investment.
- Customer behavior: Loyalty varies based on personal preferences and company actions.
- Measuring Loyalty:
- Assess the loyalty profile of your brand.
- Treat customers according to their loyalty type to extend their lifetime with the brand and increase profitability.
Developing A Value Propostion For Your Brand
Discovering customer segments
- Customer Segments: Subsets of customers with similar brand behaviors and needs, making them a good fit for a specific brand.
- Segmentation Purpose: Focus investment on customers most likely to welcome your brand’s offer due to limited commercial resources.
- Segmentation Process:
- Behavioral Groups:
- Collect data on customer behaviors and beliefs.
- Use business category and customer definitions to filter and pre-select customers into groups with similar behaviors.
- Prioritizing Groups:
- Focus on groups presenting the best return on investment for your brand.
- Decide whether to focus on customers within an existing category or create a new one.
- Determine whether to prioritize retaining current customers or acquiring new ones.
- Refining Groups:
- After defining behavioral profiles, refine by considering customer beliefs and needs.
- Use readily available data, like demographics and behaviors, to optimize research resources.
- Conduct interviews and surveys selectively due to their expense and time consumption.
- Behavioral Groups:
Discover customer insights
- Customer Insights: Beliefs just beneath the surface of everyday conversation that, if activated, can motivate behavior change.
- Research Tools:
- Customer Journey Mapping:
- Combines routine behaviors with descriptions of specific experiences.
- Involves asking customers about their routine experiences with brands and critical incidents.
- Questions cover behaviors, information channels, touchpoints, likes, dislikes, and satisfaction levels.
- Example: Interviewing Peloton customers about their fitness journey, gym choices, and specific positive/negative experiences.
- Feature Benefit Value Laddering Interviews:
- Examines each major feature of a brand systematically, starting from the brand and working toward the customer.
- Customers select important features and explain why, uncovering functional, economic, and emotional benefits.
- Involves asking “why” multiple times to uncover deeper motivations and values.
- Different customers derive different benefits from the same features based on personal values.
- Customer Journey Mapping:
- Combining Tools: Using both customer journey mapping and laddering interviews provides a complete view of the customer perspective.
- Outcome: Identifying key customer needs and beliefs to map the category and select target customer segments.
Mapping Your Business Category
- Prioritize Customer Needs and Benefits: Evaluate and select the most relevant needs and benefits from customer interviews. Make sure to list benefits that your brand and competitors deliver, as well as those that no one delivers yet but customers want.
- Survey for Importance and Perception: Conduct a survey to rank the importance of benefits on a scale of 1 to 10 and assess your brand’s and competitors’ performance on these benefits.
- Identify Positioning Benefit: Look for a single-minded benefit that differentiates your brand and unlocks the greatest customer opportunity. This benefit should be important to customers and where your brand stands out from competitors.
- Category Plot Visualization: Use a category plot to visualize potential brand positioning benefits by mapping your brand’s performance against substitutes and the benefit’s relative importance.
- Category Benefit: Identify the most important benefit in the category where the category leader is differentiated. This benefit flows from the core competence of the category leader.
- Differentiating Benefit: To compete successfully, brands need to perform within an acceptable range on the category benefit and stand out on a single differentiating benefit.
- Positioning Examples: Examples include McDonald’s positioning on convenience, Subway on health, Dyson on nicely designed air performance, Gillette on a close shave, Nike on self-esteem, and Toyota on reliability.
- Developing Value Proposition: Once you know your positioning benefit, you can move on to targeting and developing a value proposition.
- Prioritize Customer Needs and Benefits: Evaluate and select the most relevant needs and benefits from customer interviews. Make sure to list benefits that your brand and competitors deliver, as well as those that no one delivers yet but customers want.
Writing a target audience persona
- Importance of Target Audience Persona: A well-developed target audience persona aligns the internal perspective of your organization with the external perspective of the customer, helping to create an effective value proposition.
- Components of a Target Audience Persona:
- About Section: Includes a demographic and behavioral description of the customer. Details such as name, income, career stage, general behaviors, attitudes regarding the category, work environment, and life in general are included to place the target audience in their environment.
- Brand Positioning Benefit: Describes the brand positioning benefit from the perspective and in the words of the target customer. It explains what your service offering means to the target customer in their context.
- Revealing Behaviors: Includes behaviors within the category and adjacent categories that indicate a need for your brand’s positioning benefit. This section should describe real people, their goals, and aspirations, and connect them to your business category.
- Barriers to Overcome: Considers all obvious and not-so-obvious barriers your organization needs to overcome to favorably change beliefs and behaviors toward your brand. This includes changes in process, time, money, and influence that your audience may lack.
- Example: Take Peloton’s 2019 Christmas ad as an example of a misaligned target audience persona, which led to a significant loss in market value.
- Purpose: A target audience persona is a prototype of your target customer, built in rich detail to locate and engage them. It articulates the positioning benefit in the words of the customer and brings them to life, enabling the organization to execute on the customer agenda.
- Importance of Target Audience Persona: A well-developed target audience persona aligns the internal perspective of your organization with the external perspective of the customer, helping to create an effective value proposition.
Articulating your brand's value proposition
- Definition: A value proposition is the promise a brand makes to its target audience about the specific benefits they will receive from partnering with the brand.
- Components of a Great Value Proposition:
- Current Do: The customer behavior you want to change to achieve your brand’s business goal. Examples include “I don’t use the category” or “I use competitive brand Y.”
- Current Belief: The cornerstone of the value proposition. It explains the current behavior you wish to change and should contain a customer insight or problem your brand can solve better than anyone else.
- Desired Do: The behavior you want from a target customer in the future once your strategy is successful.
- Desired Belief: The future customer belief that drives the desired behavior. It must relate to the brand’s positioning benefit.
- Customer Proposition: A compelling argument the brand makes to the target customer, expressing the brand’s superior ability to deliver on the positioning benefit with supporting proof.
- Reasons to Believe: Compelling proof to support your positioning benefit, addressing multiple perspectives (economic, functional, emotional).
- Examples:
- Peloton: Targeted boutique gym customers frustrated by a lack of time, offering a similar workout more conveniently.
- Slack: Value proposition of increasing team productivity.
- Medtronic’s Micra Miniaturized Pacemaker: Effectiveness with no physical sign of a pacemaker.
- Uber: The most convenient way to get around.
- Purpose: The value proposition bridges a marketing strategy and its execution, guiding your team and their efforts.
- Examples:
Creating The Customer Brand Experience
Building a brand-customer experience map
- Customer Experience: Experiences combine behaviors and emotions. Marketers aim to create unique positive experiences that engage customers and build brand loyalty.
- Value Proposition: The brand’s value proposition articulates a strategic hypothesis. Changing a widely held belief among target customers can lead to behavior changes that support the brand’s business goals.
- Strategic Hypothesis Execution: The first step is to detail the strategic hypothesis through the design of a branded customer experience, visualizing the future.
- Brand-Customer Experience: This experience bridges strategy and execution, serving as a North Star to close the gap between current and desired customer experiences.
- Design Process:
- Current Customer Journey: Analyze the current customer journey step by step.
- Future Experience: Ask how the current experience would differ in the future based on the value proposition.
- Example (Peloton): Peloton’s value proposition is to “conveniently become the best version of yourself.” They aim to deliver an immersive boutique experience that motivates customers to live a fit lifestyle anywhere, anytime.
- Steps:
- Convince customers that at-home workouts are comparable to boutique fitness gyms.
- Emphasize the importance of convenience and deliver an incredibly convenient experience.
- Steps:
- Brainstorming: Start with an unbound brainstorm to imagine an ideal future where your team can flawlessly execute the promise, transforming customer beliefs and behaviors.
- Executional Tools: Once the brand-customer experience map is developed, use executional tools like solutions, pricing, communications, and distribution channels to implement it.
- Team Alignment: The brand-customer experience helps align your team to articulate and deliver the value proposition through each customer touchpoint.
- Customer Experience: Experiences combine behaviors and emotions. Marketers aim to create unique positive experiences that engage customers and build brand loyalty.
Align your products and services to the value proposition
- Shift from Products and Services to Solutions:
- Modern marketers use the term “solution” to encompass products, services, software, and data.
- Solutions integrate these elements to create a differentiated customer experience.
- Example of a Solution:
- A smartphone combines hardware, software, applications, support services, and usage intelligence.
- Value Proposition’s Importance:
- The value proposition links the brand with the customer and is crucial for executing the brand’s customer experience.
- Prioritizing Solutions:
- Align solutions with the value proposition.
- Example: A grocery store with a value proposition of “organic and locally sourced” should prioritize fresh produce and locally sourced dairy over paper products.
- Core Competence and Future Enhancements:
- The organization’s core competence and future trends should guide potential brand enhancements.
- SEC Classification:
- Search Attributes: Evaluated before purchase (e.g., laptop specs).
- Experience Attributes: Evaluated after use (e.g., restaurant service).
- Credence Attributes: Hard to evaluate even after use (e.g., purity of FIJI Water).
- Applying SEC Model:
- Use the SEC model to plan solution deployment along the brand-customer experience.
- Place search-dominant solutions early, experience-dominant in the middle, and credence-dominant near the end.
- Building Trust:
- Establish features first, then move to experience and credence to build credibility and trust.
- Shift from Products and Services to Solutions:
Aligning your price to your brand's value proposition
- Perception of Price: Prices seem objective but are influenced by various factors such as brand strategy and value proposition.
- Brand Influence:
- Premium brands can command higher prices (e.g., Dyson vs. Shark vacuums).
- Brand positioning affects price sensitivity.
- Business Category:
- Categories with high competition and easy price comparisons increase price sensitivity (e.g., fast food vs. restaurant food).
- Customer Factors:
- Expertise, purchasing dynamics, and perceived scarcity affect price perceptions.
- High-cost items relative to income create higher price sensitivity (e.g., cars vs. salt).
- Customer Beliefs and Behaviors:
- Importance of the benefit to the customer affects price sensitivity.
- Discounts can drive urgency but may reduce willingness to pay over time.
- Business Priorities:
- Market share-focused businesses may discount more, increasing price sensitivity.
- Profit-focused businesses may discount less.
- Value-Based Pricing:
- Use a price waterfall graphic to visualize value-based pricing.
- Reference price plus/minus brand’s differentiation value.
- Category Leadership:
- Leaders can set price references (e.g., P&G’s Tide pods).
- New entrants may price relative to category leaders (e.g., Arm & Hammer pods).
- Exercise Files:
- A table in the exercise files helps consider factors affecting price sensitivity.
- Perception of Price: Prices seem objective but are influenced by various factors such as brand strategy and value proposition.
Developing the communications plan
Design for Simplicity, Consistency, and Alignment: Effective communication should be simple, consistent, and aligned with your strategy.
- Components of the Communications Plan:
- Communications Objective: Choose one or two objectives for each campaign. Objectives include:
- Basic awareness (aided awareness)
- Information (facts about the brand)
- Behavior (specific actions like visiting a website)
- Top-of-mind awareness (brand recall)
- Image (customer advocacy and intimacy)
- Content: Tie content to the reasons to believe in your value proposition. Communicate about the brand, product/service, customer, or shared interests using hard data, social proof, or persuasion principles.
- Channel Design: Use channels that align with what your customer is already engaging with. Start with public channels (e.g., web ads, TV ads) for brand exposure and move to participatory (e.g., social media) and private channels (e.g., email, text) as engagement deepens.
- Metrics: Metrics will be addressed later in the course.
- Communications Objective: Choose one or two objectives for each campaign. Objectives include:
- Communication as Promise-Making: Every interaction sets customer expectations. Consistent execution builds customer satisfaction and brand value.
- Favorite Advertisement: Reflect on what makes your favorite advertisement effective. It’s likely simple, consistent, and aligned with the brand’s strategy.
- Flawless Execution: Effective communication should be attention-grabbing, interesting, and engaging without being annoying.
- Components of the Communications Plan:
Mapping brand-customer touchpoints
- Distribution Channels: These are the set of interdependent agents that help deliver your brand to customers.
- Planning Distribution Channels:
- Map Potential Touchpoints: Identify all potential touchpoints where you or someone on your behalf interacts with customers.
- Brand Customer Experience Map: Start with this map and layer in all executional elements needed to achieve the desired beliefs and behaviors.
- Solutions to deliver
- Pricing and pricing programs
- Communications objectives and content
- Categories of Interaction:
- Product: Tangible product flows.
- Money or Risk: Financial transactions and associated risks.
- Information: Information flow about customers, which holds long-term strategic value.
- Customer Touchpoints:
- Brands like Intel, Gore-Tex, and Byrum maintain premium status by building awareness and demonstrating value to end users.
- For new business categories, ideate touchpoints from scratch.
- For competitive categories, consider existing customer expectations.
- Channel Conflict Management:
- List all parties involved in delivering the brand experience.
- Assess their roles, skills, costs, benefits, and motivations.
- Align channel members through training, incentives, payments, contracts, and sharing information and customer reviews.
- Exercise Files: A channel alignment metrics file is included to help manage channel conflicts.
- Distribution Channels: These are the set of interdependent agents that help deliver your brand to customers.
Creating The Marketing Plan And Learning From Your Experience
Writing the strategic narrative: The marketing plan
- Importance of Execution:
- Many strategies end up unused, which wastes time and resources.
- Execution without a plan sacrifices learning opportunities.
- Engagement and Emotional Commitment:
- Successful strategies require the engagement and emotional commitment of the entire team.
- Use storytelling techniques to engage both internal and external audiences.
- Storytelling Elements:
- Strategic plans should have clear beginnings, dramatic middles, and rewarding endings.
- Use metaphors and images to bring facts and figures to life.
- Combine rational arguments with emotional appeals.
- Six Key Topics in a Marketing Plan:
- Brand Objective: Define what the brand aims to achieve.
- Business Category: Specify the category in which the brand operates.
- Bodies (Customers): Identify the target customers.
- Beliefs (Value Proposition): Articulate the brand’s value proposition.
- Behaviors (Execution): Outline the actions needed to achieve the objectives.
- Benchmarks: Set measurable goals to track progress.
- Exercise Files:
- A marketing plan outline is included in the exercise files.
- Effective Marketing Plans:
- Built on firsthand knowledge of the customer’s business.
- Realistic and based on organizational capabilities.
- Engage the internal audience on the customer agenda.
- Motivate positive change.
- Importance of Execution:
Learning from your work: Marketing metrics
- Importance of Metrics:
- Metrics connect strategy and execution, ensuring organizations stay aligned with their marketing plans.
- Metrics drive learning within organizations when aligned with the strategy.
- Setting Metrics:
- Ensure metrics reflect specific goals unique to your go-to-market plan, not just general or popular metrics.
- Ask key questions relative to your brand’s goals to set appropriate metrics.
- Brand Metrics:
- Brand Awareness: Measured as a percentage of the target population aware of the brand.
- Top of Mind Awareness: Percentage of the target population that mentions the brand.
- Brand Associations: Percentage of the population that relates your brand to a category or concept.
- Brand Preference: Percentage of the target population that prefers your brand.
- Business Category Metrics:
- Category Size (Addressable Market): Total sales of brands in the business category.
- Total Available Market (TAM): Number of people or businesses needing the category offer but not yet in the category.
- Category Penetration: Size of the category relative to its potential, calculated by dividing the category size by the available market.
- Customer Metrics:
- Retained Customers: Number of loyal customers.
- Qualified Leads: Target customers identified as good opportunities based on profiling.
- Beliefs Metrics: Measure the importance of the positioning benefit and perception relative to competitors using attitudinal surveys.
- Financial Benchmarks:
- Leading Indicators: Metrics like market share, sales, and profit that depend on brand, business category, and customer metrics.
- Lagging Indicators: Financial metrics that follow from your success with customers and promoting your brand’s value proposition.
- Using Metrics:
- Ensure metrics follow the strategy to help execute and assess.
- Use metrics to identify and fix problems and replicate successes.
- Importance of Metrics:
Thinking like a marketer
Core Choices in Marketing:
- Developing a go-to-market plan involves key choices around the brand, business category, competition, customers, value proposition, and customer experience design.
- Key Elements:
- Brand: Define and articulate the brand.
- Business Category and Competition: Understand the business category and analyze the competition.
- Customers: Develop a practical customer definition and understand customer loyalty.
- Value Proposition: Articulate the value proposition and align it with customer insights.
- Customer Experience: Design the brand-customer experience to change behaviors.
- Benchmarks: Use benchmarks to learn and improve over time.
- Analytical Thinking:
- Think analytically across multiple disciplines.
- Use a structured way to organize observations and ask the right questions for effective marketing analysis.
- Integration:
- Integrate marketing strategy with execution to learn and improve with each cycle.
- Integration is linked to integrity, ensuring ethical marketing practices.
- Practice and Curiosity:
- Mastering marketing requires curiosity about brands and customers.
- Practice by re-engineering marketing content from other companies.
- Ethical Marketing:
- Winning brands deliver on their value propositions consistently, generating customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Key Elements:
These notes are from the LinkedIn Learning course ‘Marketing Foundations‘ by Marta Dapena Baron. I highly recommend this course to anyone aspiring to become an Marketing Expert. To access this course and learn from industry experts, consider upgrading to LinkedIn Premium.
Please note that these notes were generated using LinkedIn’s AI tool, and I don’t claim ownership of the content. I’m sharing these notes solely for educational purposes and personal revision. If you have any concerns, please contact me at marketing@youthnet.in.