When it comes to domains where pure innovation is key, offering-centric marketing is indeed inevitable. In these domains, preliminary research is mostly unavailable and futuristic predictions from market analysts tend to become the focus area of market intelligence and God knows upon what such predictions are based most of the time. Investing in new products and service launches may in some cases prove less costly than going for expensive, long-winded market research when market knowledge is low, target customer understanding is feeble and product awareness almost doesn’t exist. Offering-centric marketing therefore acts as an enabler when the requirements are virtually impossible to measure beforehand. Very often, the very requirement for that newfangled product or service will be revealed when buyers can actually see or use it; the more conceptual the service, the more you need to confront it to the public in order to understand their reactions. This method is also perfectly suitable to the generation of top-of-the-mind awareness around a product or a brand which is little known, and also when you have little money left to spend on advertising. The downside of offering-centric marketing is manifold though. Poor monitoring of that type of marketing could indeed prove very costly. Offering-centric marketing may actually result in some sort of chain production of useless products, with no clients, no sales force and no future in sight. As a conclusion, however interesting offering-centric marketing may be, it really is a few cents short of a penny, and other approaches will be necessary for us to better grasp customer incentives and desires.

The second type of marketing approach I have isolated here is also well-known. I shall name it demand-centric marketing. The principles guiding demand-centric marketing are straightforward, or so it seems at first sight. The starting point is the target population. One takes a sample out of that population, interview that sample, deduce what the market is after and build new (or adapt existing) products to match the needs and desires of the target population. This method is really valuable in so far as it forces product/service managers to think about their clients first. It prevents the design of far-fetched unrealistic products and it brings realism into R&D whereas R&D has sometimes that tendency to go haywire with haphazard new product development. This approach is also about alleviating risk by adapting products or services to demand. Having said that, there are too many people asserting that demand-centric marketing should supersede offering-centric marketing altogether. Such over-simplification would not do here, mainly when it comes to ICT products or services. As with offering-centric marketing, there are also a number of danger areas revealed by this offer approach.

First of all, assessing the needs or desires of a given target population which you do not know is mostly useless and it can also prove very costly. Similarly, carrying out quantitative in-depth measurements of customer feedback to stimuli that apply to products barely understood by a population is not a good idea [18] . To prove my point, I just want to quote a real-life example, which originates from my work on the launch of a webconferencing service at France Télécom (branded as viaconferencing.com) [19] . One of the main questions we had was related to the pricing of that new service. As always with communications services, we had to choose the right ‘business model’ for the new service. Choosing the right business model is always a mind-boggling problem for communications services (pay-per-use, by the minute, by the hour, packaged use-as-much-as-you-like prices, combined packaged and usage-based prices etc. the list is almost infinite). In that particular case, it became even more complex and we almost came to a deadlock.

As a matter of fact, way back in 2001, our target population could only grasp the concept that we wanted to promote with utmost difficulty. Notwithstanding our sustained efforts at educating our sample users, their understanding of our offering remained limited; not that it mattered that much or even prevented them from using the system and becoming more familiar with it. On the contrary, we realised that hands-on experience could help them form their own opinion on webconferencing. This is why most of our task during this pilot phase consisted in recruiting new users so that they would gain hands-on experience and then form opinions and express them. When it came to ‘pricing’ structure and pricing level, even hands-on users found it difficult to give us their opinion on the subject. As a consequence, measuring pricing acceptance at that stage meant actually running the risk of spending vast amounts on surveys with few hopes of ever being able to make anything of the results. At the end of the day, when asking users –who may not even be the decision makers- about price levels, one often runs the risk of gathering answers such as “it  shouldn’t be too expensive, you know”, which are not going to be very helpful at all. As a conclusion, demand-centric marketing cannot supersede offering-centric marketing so easily. The situation is slightly more complex than that, and it is certainly not a case of offering-centric = bad or demand-centric = good. Both have to be taken into account.=The third approach that needs to be described here is what we have decided to name ‘desire-centric’ Marketing. Desire-centric marketing is different from demand-centric marketing in so far as it doesn’t assume that consumers (or even enterprise customers) are rational. That type of marketing appeals to hidden-desires and client’s deep motivations. It is a kind of marketing that fosters innovation, and it enables marketeers to unveil new opportunities and new markets. It relies more heavily on sociology [20] . In that sense, desire-centric marketing is more sophisticated and more innovative than other forms of marketing.

Yet, at the same time, it is also less predictable and more creative. Desire-centric marketing is more a question of analysing trends and predicting fashion and fads than carefully and thoroughly gathering and measuring customer feedback. That type of marketing is therefore time-bound because fads tend to evolve very quickly. They do disappear quickly and are replaced by other fads as part of a cyclical process. That kind of marketing approach is more qualitative than others. It mostly focuses on the emergence of new trends, whether they be long-term or short-lived, whether they be mainstream or just weak signals. Those interested in delving deeper into such subjects should refer to Bernard Cova and Olivier Badot’s research papers [21] and the reference books they quote.

In essence, desire-centric marketing is geared towards consumer marketing. Yet, it would be wrong to think that it doesn’t apply to B2B or Project marketing at all. Most people think that B2B is purely rational and I can assure you it’s far from being true. In fact, it’s just the other way round most of the time. As a matter of fact, there are myriad ways of writing RFP’s [22] and of justifying one’s choices once tenders have been submitted. Besides, sales persons know how to work their ways around such processes by approaching CXO’s [23] in order to influence future RFP’s, overtake their competitors or even just ensure that there won’t be any at all (this is of course not applicable to procurement processes related to local and central government bodies, which are regulate by stricter rules). At the end of the day, B2B marketing is not at all rational.

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