Even the best marketing strategies need to be revisited, if not revised. Changes in the market environment can dramatically change the marketing mix and your product plans. Marketing strategy should be viewed as a process, which means that the best laid marketing plans will change sooner or later.
Innovation is the mainstay of niche marketing, yet your customer may not be able tell you what they will need in the future. And this makes sense if you think about it.
So, what does the “best” customer look like? One way to determine which customer/s are best is by creating what I call the “preferred customer profile”. Create a list of the criteria that are most important to you and your business.
A Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA) is a unique offering that is valued by your customer and is not available from the competition. It is not what you think it is or want it to be. It is what your customer believes be true that really counts.
With increasing frequency, the technology crowd has liberally branded new products as
“disruptive technologies”. I think it fair to say that most of these new offerings are not disruptive or even interesting, for that matter. They are new products, short and simple.
Companies have four basic options for an overall brand strategy: multi-product branding, sub-branding, multi-branding, and private branding. Each has its merits, so let’s review them.
Creating a successful brand in the marketplace is very hard work and costs a lot of money. This is particularly true for consumer products where it takes millions of contacts to sell thousands of products. This is also true for the crowded B2B space where building brand awareness is getting tougher with global competitors coming out of the woodwork.
Take a quick tour of the new and trendy websites on the internet and you will find the frequent and liberal use of the word “Beta”. In most cases, the word Beta is used almost like a tagline under the company or product name to signify that this offering is new, cool, or different. The purpose is to create a “buzz” or the perception of leadership for an offering.
The entrepreneur who finds a customer segment that has been under served or overlooked can earn extraordinary rewards. Niche marketing requires that you focus on customers who cannot get what they want or need from their existing providers. For various reasons, mainstream firms will often innocently overlook or deliberately pass over customers with special needs; instead, they will choose to market to the larger, more homogeneous customer groups. These under served or overlooked segments can be very fertile ground for the entrepreneur to exploit, since they need a provider who truly understands their requirements.
Strategic Marketing is all about analyzing business opportunities and attempts to answer the following basic questions for a business:
• What might we do?
• Who do we do best?
• What must we do?