Targeting Guide #11

Don’t think that you are typical of your target customer.

You know far more about your product category than does your target customer.  You have become immersed in your product category.  You may look at three products in your category, and you see great differences between them.  Your target consumer may see those three products as being identical.  As a demonstration, shown below are three washing machines that are the top, middle, and bottom of a manufacturer’s front loading product line.

The Manufacturers Suggested Retail Prices for the three models are $1,600, $1,300, and $850.  You may be able to identify the low priced model as it appears to have fewer control buttons and a different door color.  Identifying the high priced model from the remaining two, however, is almost impossible.  The marketers in this category can probably see a great deal of difference in the three models because they are immersed in the product category, but it’s doubtful that the same is true for their target customers.

Also don’t believe that you know any “typical” buyers of your product category.  Your friends, relatives, and acquaintances probably all know for whom you work.  They too have heightened awareness of your product category because they know you.  Don’t ask for their opinions because they are not typical of your target customer.  The only person typical of your target customer is your target customer, and the only way to accurately assess the opinions of your target customers is through marketing research.

Targeting Guide #10

All competitors aren’t your brand’s competitors; only those brands that are targeting your target customers are your brand’s competitors.

Marketers sometime react to the actions of all other brands in a given product/service category.  This is often a mistake.  Only those brands which are targeting your brand’s target customers are your competitors.  The graphic to the left is a hypothesize segmentation set space.  The market is segmented along two unspecified dimensions.  The brands are positioned in the set space by consumers who bought the brand.  Your brand is the represented by the black diamond in the upper right quadrant of the set space.  Your only real competitive in this example is Competitor 1; it is the only brand purchased by consumers who are similar to your customers.

Over-focusing on competitor actions are sometimes a symptom of being sales oriented rather than marketing oriented.  The salesman often views the commercial process as a battle between his company and the competitors’ companies.  Walking into a dealer only to find a competitor’s salesman walking out the door only helps to foster this belief.  And the belief is deeply internalized if the salesman discovers that the competitor filled the dealer’s inventory.

However, the goal of marketing isn’t to defeat the competitors.  The goal of marketing is to create genuine customer value.  If the marketer is better at creating this genuine customer value than competitors, the competitors will be defeated.  The defeat is a by-product of marketing, not the goal of marketing.

Targeting Guide #9

Focus only on your current customers, and as your customers die so will your brand.

Even if you execute your marketing mix tactics perfectly so that all of your current customers are target end-users, it’s a mistake to focus only upon your current customers.  With the popularity of Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) programs, this is an easy thinking trap to fall into.  Your current customers are going to age.  These changes don’t occur rapidly; it’s a slow evolution.  If you don’t continuously attract younger target end-users into your customer base, your customer base is going to grow older and die.  Your brand will die when its target customers die.

Some of the American automobile manufacturers’ more expensive brands were at one time aspirational brands.  A young Ford owner aspired to own a Mercury or a Lincoln.  As consumers aged and as their income increased with age, Mercury and Lincoln had no trouble replacing their dead customers.  The original General Motors family of brands – Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac – was assembled to cover every price point in the automobile market.  General Motors owners aspired to move up this ladder of brands.  However, when the aspirations of younger consumers shifted to Mercedes Benz, BMW, Lexus, Infiniti, etc., the Mercury, Lincoln, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac brands found themselves with aging and dying customer bases. 

There’s nothing wrong with having either an older target market or an older customer base.  One would naturally expect higher price point brands, such as Mercedes and Rolex, to have older customer bases as discretionary income tends to increase with age.  Marketers who are targeting older consumers need to ensure, however, that as consumers age, they age into prospects for the marketers’ brand.