Often, companies are divided into three parts. One side does all the product research, development, and manufacturing. The other handles sales, marketing, and customer service. The final segment is a management layer which sits on top and supervises both. With this sort of structure, it is not surprising that when the CEO is a marketing or design-oriented person, the company becomes much more creative and business thrives. ...
Product design is often not viewed within the realm of marketing. Usually, the core drivers for product design include cost and functionality. As long as the product does what it needs to and costs are kept down, it is often not improved upon. This neglect is arguably the most crucial factor in why marketing is often accompanied by negative connotations. Very often, it is believed that the key to success is the amazing p...
Where value describes the use of the purchase, a product is the embodiment of this use. The product is a fundamental aspect within sales. If there is no product, there is nothing the customer can buy. Often overlooked by marketers, the product is the most powerful tool of communication the marketer has access to. To better conceptualise how marketers distinguish between value and product, consider a car. The value in the...
Before every purchase, an area of the brain (the Nucleus Accumbens) consistently lights up to indicate a desire to buy. Similarly, before a decision not to buy, the insula in your brain activates to tell you that the product is not worth it. This is largely determined by the cost of the product. This cost is made up of four things which overwhelm the insula if they are excessive. These four include monetary, time, energy, a...
The pleasure and pain principle is a theory that humans are driven primarily by a desire to avoid pain and obtain pleasure. If this is true, all our purchase decisions would be hinged on either giving some advantage in obtaining pleasure or alleviating pains. At the very least, we can definitively say that we buy products to solve problems: whether it be a refrigerator to prolong our food or luxury cuff-links to improve our...
Understanding how consumers make decisions is the foundation of understanding marketing. While the value formula explains how we make decisions in a simplified way, we can delve into decision making much more. The decision making process starts from the planting of the idea of purchase, and continues past purchase. <...
What if I told you there was a universal reason behind every decision in the world- an underlying formula which is used again and again? This formula not only dictates what products we buy or what services we seek out- but also all other aspects of your lives. The formula is simple: maximising perceived value. In this context, value can be defined as benefits divided by costs. If the result is greater than 1 (eg. Benefit...
