Adding value to your brand should be the main concern of who offers products and services to the market, since it is the brand that allows you to attract and retain customers.
As this is a long-term task, it is necessary to carry it out within a frame of reference that allows maintaining consistency over time and at the same time ensuring results are obtained in the short term.
Under a very simple vision of the planning process, we can consider that everything that is done in the company can be considered as objectives and strategies.
The objectives are the what, consisting of all those things that you want to achieve, such as the amount or volume of sales, market share, customer satisfaction, proportion of new customers attracted, buyback rate or loyalty index.
The strategies are the how, made up of all those actions that add value to the offer that is made to the market.
If we consider attracting and retaining customers as a main objective, we must think about how to achieve it. That is, in how to add value to the brand that covers a solution benefit so that customers feel attracted, remain satisfied and, even more, attract other customers.
In general terms, three strategies form the structure that, when maintained, allows flexible decisions to be made to add value to product and service brands and precisely serve customers: market segmentation, product differentiation, and brand positioning.
Segmentation refers to the identification of customers, current or potential, whose buying behavior is similar to the same offer, to form homogeneous groups with them.
In essence, it is about answering the general question: what are the common characteristics of each of the groups formed that make their behavioral response different?
A practical segmentation solution starts with the analysis of a Behavioral Response of current and / or potential customers, such as Product Use (if a person has been, is or will be a user; their level of use; the benefits sought or your shopping habits).
Once two or more customer groups have been formed on the basis of any of these behavioral response indicators, or a combination of them, a customer profile is obtained, so that the company can address them and design programs actionable commercials.
The characteristics to identify the Client Profile can be Demographic, such as Age, Gender, Socioeconomic Level, Family Life Cycle, Schooling, Occupation for individuals or households; or Turn, Size, Structure to Buy of the companies. Geographic or Psychographic characteristics can also be used.
Characteristics that can be measured and that serve the company to evaluate the importance of each group are sought, select those groups that are profitable to serve and allocate resources to do so in a differentiated way, with the additional requirement that the company can access in a real way to them, through the media or sales channels, for example.
Segmenting the market is not the only alternative, as can be seen in the following graph that places this strategy against other possibilities.
Differentiation refers to the design of a significant set of differences that allows the company's products / services to be distinguished from those of the competition. That is, a Sustainable Competitive Advantage that allows you not to face your competitors head-on.
A definitive and clearly distinguishable superiority must be established, offering products or services under a unique and exclusive identity, whose value is significant for a market segment.
There are six main avenues to increase the value that customers can perceive in the company's offer, depending on whether you want to increase the benefit offered or reduce the sacrifice required in a transaction.
This unique way of competing, which allows it to differentiate itself and obtain a higher contribution margin, imposes on the company the need to establish limits, either to the groups of customers to serve, to the products and services to offer, or both, to define a line of access to the market.
And it also means making concessions. That is, deliberately stopping doing something in order to be unique and exclusive in another activity, quite possibly, creating fully integrated activity systems, as opposed to managing Critical Success Factors and / or Core Competencies in isolation.
Positioning refers to the way in which customers relate products and services that compete with each other in their mind, on those attributes in which they perceive similarities and differences. It does not refer to what the company does with its products and services, but to what happens in the minds of customers.
And what happens is an over simplification of information, as a way to eliminate the confusion resulting from the excessive amount of information and options available in the market that is not necessarily equal to the differentiation that the company tries to make internally and in front of its competition.
The initial step is to know what already exists in the minds of customers, opening a virtual window, or a Perceptual Map that is the graphic representation, in a two-dimensional space, of the relative position that competing products and services have among themselves.
Once an Ideal position has been identified in the minds of customers, the company develops a positioning concept based on the differentiation strategy with which it wishes to serve a market segment.
The main challenge of the positioning concept you choose is that it must be unique, meaningful, credible and accurate so that it is actually registered in the public mind. And it is not something that 'just happens' when launching an advertising campaign, but the result of a carefully designed mix of product / service, price, distribution, communication and promotion.
In reality, we rarely find these three strategic decisions together and perfectly related to each other. However, the congruence between the three is what gives precision to the efforts to serve the market and what improves the key performance indicators of the company.
