Who hasn’t heard about the marketing mix?

As you know, the 4 P’s aim to help define:

1. what a company offers — product and price;
2. and how it does this — place and promotion.

Unfortunately, this founding framework of marketing (created in 1960) no longer encompasses what marketing means today…

In this article, I suggest a better alternative that will help you define your marketing strategy.

But first, let’s give a good definition of what marketing means in 2018.

A Good Definition Gives Guidance

Defining what marketing stands for isn’t an abstract issue.

The jobs-to-be-done framework helps understand the reasons why someone buys a particular product.

I use this tool in two ways:
1. To understand what people want in a specific market;
2. To create a compelling customer experience.

It helps me uncover the needs and desires of a market. And it makes it easier to think about the benefits and customer experience that should shape a new value proposition.

What does “Jobs to Be Done” mean?

The jobs-to-be-done framework uses “jobs” as a metaphor to explain what people are trying to achieve when they buy something.

Improving share of customer is too often just a byproduct of a marketing strategy that aims to increase market share.

Most marketers think that bigger means better.

And they focus on selling to more and more customers rather than finding ways to sell more to their existing, satisfied customers. Unfortunately, giving priority to acquiring customers over retaining them comes out of thinking short-term.

The old marketing recipe isn’t working anymore: Boost awareness with advertising, make big discounts to trigger a purchase, repeat…

Things have changed.

Technology shapes and reinforces how we behave.

• We walk and run with earphones without paying attention to what’s happening around us;
• We often check social media on our smartphones, even when we’re with friends;
• We travel across the globe to stay in the bedroom of someone we’ve never met before;
• We take tons of pictures of ourselves and send them to our friends and even strangers.

Doing these things may have looked crazy to our ancestors, yet even they shared similar behaviours… Humans have always liked listening to music, connecting with one-another, traveling to new places, and showing off.

Your product is ready. But sales aren’t taking off as you expected.

This is a sign you might have missed the discovery phase and jumped too quickly to the scaling phase.

In such a scenario, the business tried everything:

They built a sales team. They spent their marketing budget in advertising. They hired consultants. They spoke at conferences. They reached out to all their contacts. But still the market doesn’t buy it…

Here’s the common mistake:

Trying to scale too fast… If you’re wrong about what people want, they may try your product once, but don’t count on keeping them as loyal customers.

There’s something that the most successful brands do well:

They leverage existing beliefs to tell stories.

That’s because a person’s way of viewing the world is a major indicator of the decisions they make and the types of stories that resonate with them.

(Some call these beliefs “mindset”. In Positioning, Al Ries used the term “customers’ minds”. In All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin used the term “worldview” that I like the most, as the word is self-explanatory.)

As a marketer or innovator, using worldviews to look at your market helps you understand what stories resonate with your target customers, what products and services they consider buying, and why.

Most attempts to innovate are product-driven. Someone has a cool idea for a product. And then a marketing team has to find a market for the new concept.

Products are born this way because it’s less demanding to start with an idea than with an audience.

That’s the wrong way to develop innovative products. In the words of Seth Godin:

“You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.”

— Seth Godin

We can all agree that:

– Creating something is easy.

– Creating something that people care about is much more difficult.

“What do our customers really want?” That’s what you want to find out.

But are you asking the right questions?

Some questions should never be asked. Never.

1. Do you think this is a good idea?

2. Would you buy this?

3. How much would you pay for this?

Why Are These Questions Bad Market Research?

There are many reasons asking these three questions won’t help you.

1. Your customers can’t predict in the abstract if they will buy a new product, in the future

A decisive challenge when you sell SaaS solutions is to generate leads. Your sales team need as many qualified leads as possible. They don’t want to waste their time with visitors who will never buy. Designing the right pricing strategy can have a large impact on that.

Pricing Strategy for SaaS: A Smarter Alternative to Freemium?

Freemium is a popular pricing strategy to attract potential customers. Users can start using your product for free with some limitation. The company then expects that the ‘freemium’ customers will use the product more and more and start buying a premium plan.