Coherent Thinking .org

Somewhere I heard/read a description of the states through which the customer must move to realize a sale. I recall Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action or similar synonyms. These focus on marketing and sales. I would add Oblivious at the beginning and Satisfaction at the end to round out the complete business process.

Oblivious is a given. In the beginning the customer may not know your product exists or is even possible and definitely does not know that you exist. The customer Profile is a tool for analyzing the different aspects of your customer. Where your customer is. What he reads, watches, and browses. What he wants, values, and needs. How he can be motivated to buy. I suppose we could coin the 6 W’s of the customer- who, what, when, where, why, and how.

Awareness is a preliminary requirement. The customer needs to become aware. This may be a result of a few of the P’s of marketing. Promotion, Placement, Packaging, Publishing, Page-rank can all play a role in making the customer aware of your product. Promotion covers the range of awareness generating activities. Packaging can be promotional at the point of sale or in a more viral fashion if a potential consumer notices your packaging somewhere else. Page-rank comes into play if the customer is aware of the general type of product or can find you by indirect searches- such as cold and flu symptoms to find a cold remedy. Awareness is often closely coupled with interest if the product/value is compelling, but it is possible for a customer to be aware of something for a long time without becoming interested and learning more.

A key challenge in generating awareness is the strong resistance most people have developed to anything that remotely resembles advertising. Ad clicks on web pages can be a few per ten thousand views. I know I’ve developed an unconscious ability to defocus my eyes when I see something that might be advertising.

Interest may be developed slowly with an incremental awareness building campaign, or in the best case may come directly from the same promotion which creates the initial awareness. Generally interest begins when a customer relates your product to some need or value.

Desire is when the customer wants the product. The features/benefits/value have been accepted. Desire does not equal purchase. There are millions who desire the latest big screen TV or smartphone who fail to act.

Action is the tipping point where the perceived value emotional or otherwise exceeds the price resistance, spousal disapproval, and other disincentives and the customer actually buys.

I notice- in keeping with the newer product life cycle management and concurrent business models Satisfaction now appears in some lists. I see this as a critical addition. It can encompass the entire production and fulfillment cycle through to actual customer satisfaction.

Satisfaction is the point at which the value has been delivered and the customer is and remains satisfied. All aspects of product manufacture, quality, delivery, performance, support, and warranty can factor in customer satisfaction.

It is useful to consider how actions taken in a marketing or product plan contribute to moving the customer through these states. If you use the 31 P’s of marketing each of the selected P’s and activities implemented under that P should have a clear connection to advancing through the states.

The first marketing book I read defined the5 P’s to be considered in a marketing plan- what I would now call a product management plan. These still seem to be the most common 5 P’s.

• Product
• Price
• Promotion
• Placement
• Positioning

The first 4 P’s were defined in the 60’s and are classic marketing. Product covers all aspect of the product- features, specifications, performance, and value. Price is based on market pressures and how the product is positioned in the market- high value, high performance, or lowest priced. Placement is how the customer gets the product and covers all aspects of distribution channels through to the placement on a store shelf in front of the customer.

Positioning appears to be a later addition which I find fits well. How do you position you product in the hearts and minds of your customer- is it higher priced but worth every penny; is it the lowest priced? To some extent position is a mix of the first 4 P’s, but it is critical in establishing a plan and profitability.

Some authors substitute People instead of position which I think is a mistake from a marketing perspective. Most definitions of People that I have seen are more about roles in implementing a product or a selling process than about marketing.

Over the years I’ve encountered many more P’s which either duplicate, replace, or expand upon the “true” 5 P’s. Or is it true 4 P’s or 7 P’s, 8 P’s, 9 P’s, 10 P’s…?

• Presence – covers customer awareness, are you perceived as a player in the market? probably a subset of promotion.
• Performance – an aspect of product.
• Process – a departure from classic marketing- what is the complete process whereby the product is created/delivered. This is more business line or product line management.
• Physical evidence – a subset of promotion, what does the customer see- samples, brochures, etc to give the confidence.
• Packaging – a combination of product and promotion, and physical evidence. How does the package promote your product on the shelf? Does it instill confidence or create desire? Does it add value- e.g. no drip spouts or easy open caps?
• People – again largely described as a general management issue- who implements your product plans. Some authors also list a customer profile in their definition of people.
• Persistence – primarily a sales factor. Do your sales people persist?
• Pull versus Push – a subset of promotion. Push relies on forcing product into the distribution chain and expecting it to sell. Pull is creating a demand directly with the end consumer an expecting that demand to pull through distribution channels.
• Personal Credibility- I suppose this could cover corporate credibility, but I have only seen it used to describe a salesman’s personal credibility. So this is a P of selling not marketing.
• Personalization – Some web oriented authors think this is a new market enhancer. The auto industry offered a degree of personalization with its interior and exterior color choices and optional equipment. Gen X&Y may not remember when it was common to order a car from a large menu of options. The web has allowed highly personalized ordering such as Dell custom configuration and personal customer experiences such as igoogle and my.yahoo.
• Profile – who is the customer? what do they value/want? Where are they? Where will they find my product? I like this for fundamental marketing since the original 4 P’s do not explicitly mention a customer.
• Participation – allow the customer to interact to define the brand- usually through social media.
• Peer to Peer – using social media to interact with and involve the customer.
• Predictive Modeling – nice if you can rely on the models.
• Purchases – huh? not sure who thinks this is a P of marketing. It is the ultimate goal  so I guess it is worth mentioning.
• Post Purchase – as part of an integrated product or business plan customer satisfaction and support post purchase are important to insure repeat business, manage support and warranty costs, and realize potential secondary revenue opportunities.
• Partners – again usually an implementation detail- are we talking production partners or channel partners?
• Points – not a fundamental P. Point clubs and incentives fall under promotion, and perhaps price.
• Prizes – not a fundamental P. Prizes fall under promotion, and perhaps price.
• Pro Bono – not a fundamental P. Giveaways fall under promotion, and perhaps price.
• Privileges – not a fundamental P. Privileges fall under product, promotion, or perhaps price.
• Personas – added for ‘inbound’ web marketing. Persona is a customer profile.
• Publishing and PageRank – added for web and search engine based marketing. These fall under promotion and reflect the use of a new technology and media.
• Profit – probably a sub calculation of Price

When I started this I was trying to rationalize how many P’s there are to consider in marketing. I give you the 32 P’s of business and product management and marketing. The relationship between the P’s in not a simple indented list. It also appears that the P’s are to some extent a function of your market decisions and your target customer.

The P’s in the 60’s still describe marketing, but seem a bit dated. The customer is not mentioned and the old silo organization appears implicit. There is an implied handoff to product design, engineering, manufacturing, and eventually sales is on the hook to deliver the market projections. I think a more concurrent product management approach adjusted for the realities of your market is in order. 

My preferred top level P list:

• Profile – know your customer first
• Product – define your performance/value
• Price – exploit your value, calculate profit too.
• Promotion – develop awareness and desire, I think this needs to include credibility and corporate reputation.
• Positioning – to some extent a combination of price, promotion, and placement, but worth listing.
• Placement – how your product reaches your customer
• Process – in a more integrated collaborative business environment marketing does not have the luxury of specifying a product and sales targets and leaving it to operations and sales to meet the goals. The entire process of implementing and delivering the product should be considered.

Please feel free to use these 32 P’s as a checklist to make your own list of P’s for your planning.

Most of us like technology and like to show rapid progress. This combination tempts us to focus on the easy fun tasks in a project and to defer the challenges. There is certainly a place for rapid prototyping, agile programming, scrum, and mock-ups, especially when these tools are used to learn and resolve questions at minimal investment. Unfortunately I have seen many cases where these relatively empty shells are perceived as substantial progress..The end result is often described as the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time. The reality is that by focusing on the easy work the accomplishments are overestimated and the remaining work which may even be impossible is grossly underestimated, but you look good because you’ve completed 90% of the tasks on the list.

I encountered a perfect example of this when I was interviewing a programmer with a masters degree for a business I owned. He listed a failed robotics venture on his resume and I asked him where he’d focused his effort and what critical challenges had to be addressed for that venture to succeed. He’d been spending investors’ money 20 years ago to develop a humanoid bipedal robot. I was thinking balancing on two legs, processing visions information, recognizing shapes, and coordinating hands and fingers would be on the list. His reply was that fast processors could handle that complexity. He had found a plastic material which looked like skin because he felt that people wouldn’t be comfortable working around a robot that didn’t have lifelike skin. I repeated my question about solutions to the fundamental challenges. He didn’t acknowledge any issues with these critical tasks which are still not well implemented today. Looking at the requirements bipedal motion wasn’t necessary. Wheels would work fine for a robot in an industrial environment. A hand which could do useful work coupled with vision to accommodate a varying environment should have been at the top of the list. Skin should not have occupied a single brain cell. At least I didn’t waste too much time on the interview. I wonder what the investors who had backed his venture were thinking.

The DOD had an atomic powered airplane project which is another example of focusing on noncritical tasks while trivializing deferring the impossible. An incredibly detailed set of plans was produced including menus for the crew which listed which days prunes would be served. Critical issues such as thrust versus weight were also on the table, but were not resolved before the extraneous details were generated. The issues which killed it centered on thrust versus weight which was probably not insoluble, and more intractable issues such as shielding a flying reactor and what happens to a lightweight reactor in a plane crash. There was some need for some basic data on weight and floor space required to support the long missions made possible by nuclear power, but this data already exists since every ship in the navy has to accommodate crews for weeks or months at a time. These questions could have been answered with a quick estimate of calories per day, weight per calorie, and volume per calorie. The money spent detailing crews quarters, menus, etc should have been spent on the fundamental go-no go issues.

The best way I know to avoid this is to identify the critical requirements. Then understand what must happen to meet these requirements, and finally ask yourself what might go wrong? A requirements tree is a quick visual way to begin this process. The requirements tree can be extended many levels and can include potential failures or a tabular Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) process can evaluate the risks. I usually add the failure risks to the tree during brainstorming and use the FMEA as a checklist for tasks, reviews, and to close out a safety analysis procedure.

Ironically one of the more maligned speeches of this decade said it well-There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones. I think in a separate speech he also referred to things we think we know which are wrong. I’m not going to discuss politics in this blog, but I have to admit I was surprised by the honesty. The points are to be aware of what you don’t know, where you might be wrong, how certain you can be in your decisions, and to  focus some effort on analyzing, resolving, and managing the possibilities. 

If all you have are simple tasks by all means dive in and go full speed ahead. If you have a difficult project with some uncertainty take the time to identify and face the uncertainty head on at the beginning. Don’t create a false sense of progress by doing lots of easy tasks and avoiding the ones you know might be show stoppers.