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We live in a world of supply.
Organizations produce or distribute products and services; marketers are given the challenge of creating demand for what is pumped out of the manufacturing process or handed to them from suppliers.
How do they do it?
They are victims to the method most people follow; they look for the easy way.
A way to perform their responsibilities by deploying a minimum amount of effort and hoping to achieve maximum payback.
Most marketers (my observation over 30 years) resort to applying the “one size fits all” principle; that any product can satisfy the needs of the mass market.
It’s a simple process.
Flog the product to as many potential customers as you can stressing the features and benefits believed to satisfy the “average” consumer.
And hope for a high hit rate.
This approach is a waste of time and effort.
Why?
Because there is no such thing as an “average” customer or a mass market! No two customers are alike in terms of their needs, wants and desires , thus this “lowest common denominator” strategy of marketing to a diluted level of demand is flawed from the outset.
Yes, it will result in some sales (where a person exhibits the demand characteristics of the masses targeted), but this hit-and-miss approach will fall short of achieving a healthy return on investment because of the many targeted individuals who don’t “look like” the mass persona and don’t respond to the offer.
It’s time for organizations to shift from the supply world to the demand world.
Where the wants of specific consumers are given precedence over what the organization produces; what the customer “covets” trumps what the product or service does.
Related: What Is the Toughest Challenge a Leader Faces Today?
This requires re-vectoring the focus for marketing from a one size fits all to a “one size fits ONE” philosophy where :
— products and services are targeted to a small number of potential customers whose requirements are special and unique to THEM;
— products are integrated to produce solutions having greater value than the sum of its product elements;
— “common” or “average” is purged from the marketing lexicon;
— success is measured by the number of personalized solutions created;
— the ultimate goal of segmentation is to discover as many “segments of ONE” as possible to understand demand at the micro personal level;
— the role of “Customer Manager” is introduced in the marketing organization to create personalized offers for discrete groups of customers; the emphasis on traditional product management is reduced;
— marketing’s primary performance metric changes from product market share to “share of customer” - the percentage of a customer’s total spend an organization holds.
Lazy marketing persists with one size fits all; relevant marketing in today’s world has moved to one size fits ONE