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‘Reverse-engineering marketing’, in a way, means
designing products or services based on customer feedback. But
it goes way beyond the simple and straightforward analysis of
customer dissatisfaction. As a matter of fact, ‘Reverse-engineering
marketing’ actually paves the way for product and service improvement
and it is not just a matter of analysing user or customer dissatisfaction.
The principle guiding Reverse-engineering marketing is the following:
“It must be easier to improve something that people know about,
rather than ask them to specify what they ignore or even fail
to understand”. This basic principle is key to ICT marketing
success in more than many cases. Reverse-engineering marketing
is in fact the best of both worlds: the perfect match between
demand-centric and offering-centric marketing. Reverse-engineering
marketing favours real-life product/service testing as well as
community-work with one’s clients in order to improve one’s products
until customer satisfaction is fulfilled. This is how concepts
and new ideas –however eccentric- can be developed, in real-time,
in real-life. Besides, Reverse-engineering marketing is a great
means of establishing a special relationship with your clients
as well as getting them involved in the product-design process.
And God knows that most of them like that, for it puts them in
a role that is far more rewarding than that of mere ‘consumers’.
Microsoft
certainly were one of the first to implement such an approach
on a global scale. They indeed managed to generate a certain level
of intimacy with their clients when they asked them to participate
in the design of their new product, prior to the official release
date. In that case,
beta testers actually volunteer to test the product. Most of them
are real enthusiasts who share a common passion for either the
brand or the product.
Being
part of the design of a new product is a sign –in their eyes-
that they are also part of the company, that they are more than
mere “consumers”.
Beta
testers are not the result of the random sampling of a given population,
they are real enthusiasts. Most shareware designers use that method
in order to let their users test their products free of charges.
After a 30-day-period, users who want to go on using the software
will then have to pay a small fee to the software editor. Most
of time, this process is carried out online. Amongst some of the
most popular office desktop utilities, Jasc’s Paintshoppro imaging
software is probably one of the most successful.
PaintshopPro
is very inexpensive and yet, most of its functionality is as good
as Adobe’s very professional Photoshop suite. Besides, Photoshop
is far less user-friendly than PaintshopPro. And yet, very few
of paintshoppro’s users can remember what version 1 of their favourite
piece of software looked like in 1991, i.e. a very immature imaging utility, hardly
better than the Microsoft paint utility that came standard with
Windows 3.0. Reverse-engineering marketing made it possible for
Paintshop Pro to evolve so dramatically.
Strategic
Marketing
Strategic
marketing is in our eyes one of the pillars of marketing Management.
We will dedicate a whole chapter to that theme at the end of this
article.
Strategic
marketing is the enabler that makes it possible to share a common
vision across the entire organisation. At the heart of Strategic
marketing, one can find Strategic assessments which make it
possible to elicit the current strategy and spell out all the
strategic objectives which will guide future action. Thanks to
a strategic assessment, one will be able to target actions according
to the lifecycle of products and services and to establish priorities
in terms of the development of new products and services. This
preliminary phase is crucial for providing the necessary strategic
focus. Without it, most strategic endeavours tend to end up with
managers turning around like headless chickens and trying to compensate
hindsight with frantic haphazard activity. Lack of focus often
forces managers to multiply innovations with no apparent erason
of logic. A proper strategic assessment will provide vision and
guidance to product marketing but a frantic bout of innovation
will never provide a strategic vision for the organisation.
On the
other hand, proper strategic planning should not be mixed up with
that stressful and ridiculous exercise named financial planning,
which consists in projecting growth year on year based upon last
year’s results and without the under pinning of a proper strategic
market and product analysis. Financial planning is unfortunately
very commonplace. It won’t give however any hint as to how markets
night react, it mostly overlooks markets and products issues by
putting more pressure on the sales force but in times of crisis,
it proves mostly ineffectual. Last but not least, it almost always
fails to encourage the anticipation of future issues .
ICT
Marketing Mapping
Figure 8:
ICT Marketing
Segmentation Mapping
In the
above diagram I have mapped ICT marketing against two axes: one
axis is showing the type of clients (consumer, SME’s, corporate
accounts); the other axis caters for the level of customisation
which applies to the type of product or service that is being
sold. We have excluded soho clients from this diagram although
they do differ from both the consumer and enterprise markets (whether
they be small or medium).
From
this diagram, we can isolate two main trends: on the one hand,
most consumer markets are now penetrated by professional products,
although such products were not aimed at them at the outset. In
2003, more than 50% of personal computers sold in France were
purchased from supermarkets. Amongst such products, one can find
a great number of products of a professional standard which could
be used by the average white collar, if not superior. Another
example is the amazing penetration of three-in-one printers –originally
aimed at SME’s- within the consumer market.
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