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Observations and Trends in Marketing Click to edit Master title style

Marc Van de perre Managing partner Interface Marketing Vice-president Belgian Marketing Foundation Chairman B2B Expertgroup

The Problem with our Western Economy...

Overcapacity

Overcapacity

Customers are scarce, not products Demand is the problem, not supply

Overcapicity leads to hypercompetition

... And what’s the result?

So, how do companies (try to) survive in this hypercompetitive environment?

The solution is

finding

and

maintaining a

sustainable competitive advantage

Competing on products?

Lowering production cost?

And what about brand?

The channel advantage

Companies are putting at least as much effort into

how

they go to market as into

what they bring to market.

Built on the logic of managing manifacturing industries

Built on the logic of managing information and information industries

The changing perception of value Consumers have become more sophisticated, demanding, and micro-segmented Consumers increasingly trust only their own ability to seek value Fragmenting demographics and user needs multiply the range of market segments Marketers will have to deliver clear articulated value to an ever more cynical set of consumers

The Growing Importance of Changing Generations

It will no longer work to market to the averages. We must learn to market to the differences! There’s no such thing like an ‘average consumer’. We must market to the individual and to accomplish that we must understand how today’s new customers differ. Moreover, generations change at the speed of light and guarantee a melting pot of the most diverse ideas, habits, and needs (boomers, yuppies, dinkies, bobo’s,…)

Communicating with the consumer The world of fully interactive multimedia is far from accomplished, but: Marketers increasingly have success in communicating with smaller and smaller consumer segments through multimedia technologies and sophisticated database marketing programs. Technology is an enabler but at the cost of an increasingly complicated decision-making process!

Time Poverty

Needless to say we live in a fast paced world Customers are too busy to read ads, too busy to shop Customers don’t wait to let the info come to them, instead they organize in searching and processing the info they need (e.g. bots) Marketers will have to cope with the speed of change. Convenience and time-to-market are key!

Markets are changing faster than our marketing!

Two major forces affecting businesses

Supply-side Commoditization

Demand-side Customization

The Big Challenge A New Business Organization From

To

Enterprise vision

Short term, Product-focused.

Long term, Customer-focused.

Organization

Hierarchical structure.

Interprising, Networked economy, Hub & spoke organizations

Sales

Little customer knowledge, Face to face selling.

High customer knowledge, Mass-customization, Multiple channels selling, E-commerce.

After sales and services

Reactive, Separate processes and organization, Slow.

Proactive, Integrated processes and organization, High responsiveness.

The New Marketing Paradigm

The concepts of mass production and mass marketing are giving way to new business models in which customer relationships are becoming the central issue The value chain of the ‘customer focused’ enterprise now follows the sellbuild-redesign principle in contrast with the former one of design-build-sell Sell

Build

Redesign

Multi-Channel Environment

Multiple Forces of Change

Rising Consumer Expectations

Service Commoditisation

Information Intermediaries

Point & Click Promiscuity

Crushed Value Chain

Digital Only Competitors

Channel Preference & Replacement

Fixed Asset Syndrome

Business Disintegration

Disintermediation

Amazon.com

Author

P

E

P

D

Customer

Electronic Publishing

Businesses need to shift from focusing on their

product portfolios to focusing on their

customer portfolios.

The key success factor to implementing a customer-centric organization is the ability to create and deliver customer value that goes beyond the product or service.

The Customer-Focused Enterprise

Customer

The Customer-Focused Enterprise

Customer

The Customer-Focused Enterprise

Outsourced Outsourced

Customer

Outsourced

The Customer-Focused Enterprise

Competencies always outlive products

The customer-focused organization requires a corporate knowledge to define, create and deliver superior value to the customer. The focus question we should ask ourselves is: What critical skills should we develop and outsource to be best in the world from our customers’ viewpoint?

Wish you lots of success! [email protected]