Marketing is usually a dog-eat-dog world. It's all about "I'm better than you!" and "oh yeah? Well you don't have this feature." Of the notable bitter rivalries which exist, none is more instantly recognisable than Burger King and McDonalds. Whether you're loving it how it is or want to have it your way, the two restaurant chains just can not seem to get along. That is... until today.
*Please stay on hold while we transfer you for the seventeenth time.* Marketing often stops after the purchase is made. This is a mistake. Bad after-sales service and technical support is the cause of a majority of negative word of mouth. If a product is bad, it will cause complaints and there will be a minority of customers who are disgruntled enough to want to return the product. In this situation, having a...
In a world where everything comes easily, problems in delivery are not only costly in terms of logistics, but also in depressed sales. The average computer user will only wait 2 seconds before leaving a web-page which loads too slowly. While we would wait longer than that for a product to be delivered, we can learn from the web that customers are incredibly impatient. Waiting for lines, products to be delivered, and even...
Ever had a bad experience with a specific company? Maybe those salesmen from company XYZ do not stop harassing you, or maybe you had to be transferred 7 times over a two week period to cancel a service. The word service itself has bad connotations with many people. Why would someone contact customer service? To complain. When do you bring up the service at a restaurant or cafe? Often, it is because you were unsatisfied w...
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. <...
