When Darwinism catches up with Marketers
A simple framework for marketers to stay Adaptable - how to think about a product category or a customer segment
Of the many skills attributed to marketers - vision, execution, quant, creativity, cross-functional influence - adaptability does not often make the cut.
Yet the ability to think differently and move faster than the competition is essential to a marketer’s success. The essence of the role lies in generating new ideas and executing the ones with the highest leverage to create perceived differentiation and propel growth.
This is why adaptability matters. Marketers who constantly strive to expose themselves to new ecosystems learn more and at a faster clip than their counterparts in competition. Think marketers who have either shepherded a business from sub $10 mil to $50 mil and beyond or have worked across more than 2-3 industries and developed transferable skills along the way.
Both types have amassed a wealth of experience that can be translated to diverse industries and business contexts.
But is there any wisdom that these marketers can transmit to others?
Perhaps a toolkit for marketers who have been with one industry and seek to place a bet on another industry? Or a circumstance when their organization launches a new product that targets a customer segment that the team has no experience marketing to?
Let’s take the example of 3 diverse industries -
Business software
Cosmetic
Confectionary
As a potential buyer of these product categories, you go through an arguably different buying journey for each. It’s as if each product category has its own signature…its own amalgam of rational and emotional parameters that helps you to make sense of it.
Introducing,
Most of your buyers, on most occasions, experience and consume different product categories based on some sequence of the above.
BUSINESS SOFTWARE -
If you sell business software, you expect your buyers to go through a buying process similar to this -
In the initial phase of category discovery, the rational part of the brain does a majority of the work, craving for safety by seeking recommendations. Buyers tend to optimize for products that are “less likely to be terrible” than “what is better”. Players in this category speak to this need by conveying and reinforcing information that appeals to the Prefrontal cortex - think TCO (The Total cost of Ownership) & ROI calculators and other Utility-maximizing parameters.
This is a classic case of THINK -> FEEL -> DO.
COSMETIC-
The primary purchase trigger in Cosmetic is the buyers’ need to express their individuality, to be uniquely themselves. And marketers in this category have a field day. Why? Because there is no ceiling to how unique you could be.
Therefore, the consumer exhibits a more variety-seeking behavior than in the case of enterprise software. This is also because of the relatively lower product price and the individual decision-making process.
This is FEEL -> THINK -> DO in action.
CONFECTIONARY-
You are at Walmart. You spent the last 40 mins hoarding up grocery and household items, totaling $270. You queue up to pay but then you notice a new brand of gum next to the counter. You don’t mind shelling out the additional $5. So what triggered this impulse purchase? Perhaps a combination of product display and in-store context.
You get back home, pop the gum into your mouth, feel the sensorials, simultanoeusly evaluate whether this was a good buy at all.
This is Do-> Feel -> Think in action.
If you do get a chance to apply this framework to other categories around you, let me know if this framework helped.
In my next post, I plan to discuss how Category disruptors challenge this “accepted” sequence and upend this framework.