Professional Documents
Culture Documents
growth in its sales and the total market is growing by only 3 percent,
the result is excess capacity.
Marketing management is
the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping,
and growing customers through creating, communicating,
and delivering superior customer value.
Brand
“A brand is a storehouse
of trust that matters more and more as choices multiply.
People want to simplify their lives.”
Increasingly, a company
wins not with a single advantage but by layering one advantage
on top of another over time. The Japanese have been masters at this,
first coming in with low prices, then with better features, then with
better quality, and then with faster performance. The Japanese have
recognized that marketing is a race without a finishing line.
The late Roberto Goizueta, CEO of Coca-Cola, recognized
Coke’s competitors. When his people said that Coke’s market share was
at a maximum, he countered that Coca-Cola accounted for less than 2
ounces of the 64 ounces of fluid that each of the world’s 4.4 billion
people drank every day. “The enemy is coffee, milk, tea, water,” he
told his people. Coca-Cola is now a major seller of bottled water.
Customers can
be divided into those we enjoy, those we endure, and those we detest.
But it is better to divide them into financial categories: platinum,
gold, silver, iron, and lead customers. The better customers
should be given more benefits, both to retain them longer and to
give other customers an incentive to migrate upward.
“meaningless
differentiation” can work. For example, Alberto Culver makes a
shampoo called Natural Silk to which it does add silk, despite admitting
in an interview that silk does nothing for hair. But this kind of
attribute attracts attention, creates a distinction, and implies a better
working formula.
• Xerox will replace any Xerox product within three years until
the customer is fully satisfied.
• A. T. Cross will replace its pens and pencils for life. The customer
mails the broken pen or pencil to the company and it is
repaired or replaced free and mailed back.
Saturn will take its new car back within 30 days if the customer
is not satisfied
The truth is that ideas can come from anywhere, and not only
from customers or the lab. Every firm is a potential hotbed of ideas,
except the company fails to stimulate them or lacks a net to catch
them. Why not appoint a high-level idea manager to whom salespeople,
distributors, suppliers, and employees could send their ideas?
The idea manager has a committee that finds the better ideas and rewards
those whose ideas the company implements. The Dana Corporation,
for example, expects every employee to place two ideas a
month into the company’s suggestion box on any improvements the
employee senses, whether in selling, purchasing, energy use, travel,
or other areas.
Royal Ahold, the giant
Dutch food retailer, has the brand philosophy, “Everything the customer
sees we localize. Everything they don’t see, we globalize.”
When naming its new products, a company must make sure its
name will travel internationally. Chevrolet named its new car Nova,
not realizing that in Latin America no va means “doesn’t go.”
Pepsi-Cola had
to promise Russia that it would help sell Russian vodka abroad in exchange
for selling Pepsi-Cola in Russia.