Ira is a product and communications strategist, a graduate of Wordshop. She worked in Russia with the agencies Friends Moscow, IQ marketing, Monstars of Creative, Stereotactic and brands Google, L'Oréal, Kaspersky, Outline festival. Now Ira is launching her own startup Piqls in Silicon Valley, which she writes about in detail in the Telegram channel @огурцы.
— Ira, what is a marketing strategy and what does it consist of?
In the standard understanding, it is a long-term action telegram codes list plan to achieve a goal. Most often, a sustainable competitive advantage in the market. Marketing strategy implies: brand positioning, communication strategy by messages and communication strategy by channels.
Positioning strategy is a company’s broadcast of statements about its brand, i.e. “my brand is about this.” For example, there are three large companies on the market that deliver prepared meals. To successfully sell a product or provide services, a brand needs to speak to the audience in a single, value-based language. Why do people order prepared meals? Some don’t like to bother and thus save their time and energy, while others simply don’t know how to cook. The value messages for these audiences will be about one thing — prepared meals, but they will be different in their content. You will tell the first: “You will eat right with your crazy schedule,” and the second: “Give up your dream of being Jimmy Oliver and buy prepared meals.”
Positioning is a reflection of your audience's values.
A perfect example of positioning is the confrontation between Adidas and Nike. Both are sportswear. The fact that they are stylistically different is not as important as the fact that they are different at the level of values and brand meaning. And this is exactly what allows them to differentiate themselves and fight for the audience. Nike's territory is "sports for everyone." Its philosophy is based on the understanding of how difficult it is for an ordinary person to start doing sports. This is what they convey in their videos.
Nike's 2013 "Possibilities" commercial inspires people to challenge their own limits and achieve new goals.
And Adidas lives in the territory of so-called creators, opinion leaders and other cool, fashionable and self-confident young people. They work with a different audience and speak to it in a completely different language. In their videos, singers, dancers, artists are fashionable and daring. And if Nike offline organizes some kind of race or organizes free sports training in the park, then Adidas is more likely to make a cool party with rappers, give them sneakers, stir up a collaboration, etc. This is how positioning and differentiation among competitors is built. They are necessary first of all when we are dealing with more or less identical products.
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— Where to start building positioning?
With research inside your product. Companies often make a mistake: they start looking for something outside. For example, a very common request: "we want young people" or "give us very wealthy people", etc. Brands do not look at their product from the inside and therefore do not understand that in fact they may have a completely different audience.
The first thing you need to start with is to clearly outline the structure of your product. For example, let's go back to food designers. If you break this product down into its parts, you can already build a projection of the audience: who are these people who need this product. These are busy people who lack healthy nutrition, and they want to fix it. So you look for the pain in the life of the audience that your product solves. That is, the structure of the strategy positioning begins with pain and ends with a solution to this pain.
The less the problem is understood, the more money will be needed for marketing. You need to chew everything up, explain, etc. Therefore, it is foolish to think that the absence of competitors is good. The presence of competitors indicates the presence of demand. Firstly, that it is needed at all, and secondly, that someone has already dug this path and thus saved you money on marketing.
For example, what is happening now in mental health services. New products are constantly appearing, and this is good. One company enters the market and starts investing in marketing, which means in people's awareness. And if ten enter at once, they all form a new niche, helping each other. Yes, of course, they are biting off each other's audience a little, but overall this is better than a situation where there are no competitors. This means that the problem is not recognized by the audience and you will have to spend a lot of money on marketing.
The second is writing hypotheses about the audience. Who are these people with this pain? This is how we sketch out our future target audience.
A mistake and an outdated model is to segment the audience by social demographic. For example, my product is a smartphone game. "Games for teenagers, we need to look for an audience from 10 to 17 years old." But what about adults? Don't they play games? In fact, you should look for behavioral patterns, not just age. There is a category of people who play games. Which ones? Probably some similar to mine. This is my audience, and within it there are teenagers, people 30+, etc. When you mark up the patterns, you will see subsegments by age and other characteristics. This will determine what messages you will use to attract these segments.
Next comes the analysis of competitors. We find them and compare them from the point of view of the product, to what extent yours is objectively better, worse. Competitors are not only a similar product. It can also be an indirect competitor: a tool that is currently solving a problem. It may not be a service, but some method. For example, earlier an alternative way to get somewhere without calling a taxi service was hitchhiking. This was an indirect competitor to taxis.
When analyzing competitors, you need to forget that you have your own opinion. From now on and forevermore, you look at your product only through the eyes of the audience. The problem with some brands is their blindness. They think that their product is the best because they put their soul into it and know it very well: how to use it, what its advantages are, etc. But the audience does not know any of this, it is not loyal to you, it does not care about you or your product yet. This is what you need to proceed from.
Accordingly, when you do a comparative analysis, you must figure out what makes you better in the eyes of the audience. Based on this, build your messages.
By analyzing competitors' communications, you can find many useful insights: which marketing channels definitely work, how best to use them. You need to look at those who have been on the market for several years and occupy a normal share. This means that they have tried a lot and chosen working tools. This, of course, is not a guide to action on building your own communications strategy, but part of the input. You can also look at weak competitors, find out what they do so as not to repeat their mistakes.
The next step is to analyze the context in which the product exists. It can be cultural, economic, technological.
The technological context is when you look at the development of technologies. For example, I want to make my own application with a camera, it should have artificial intelligence. I will look at the technologies of artificial intelligence development, read articles about how it will develop, how fast, what I can implement now, try to predict how many years I will have a program at most.
Cultural context. For example, you make leather jackets, and the eco-friendly trend is developing in the country. Genuine leather is clearly not eco-friendly, so you need to keep this issue under control. How quickly will this trend catch up with your audience? And therefore, how quickly will they switch to another product? All this in order to predict at what point you need to change something in your product or positioning.
At the intersection of these four blocks: product, audience, competitors and context, lies the golden mean of positioning.
- Okay, we've defined our positioning. What's next?
The positioning strategy is broken down into communication messages.
Nike has a key message: "Just do it!" But if we simply say: "Just do it!", we will be told: "Well, thanks, great!" It turns out to be such useless, unsubstantiated advice from the category "Are you depressed? Pull yourself together, go for a run, do yoga."
To get your idea across to a person and make them do something, you need to break down the positioning into its components. In order for someone to finally "Just do it!", you need to tell them many times and in different variations, show them proof of why it's cool, situations in which they will see themselves, etc. Then they will believe. It's like a personal dialogue between two people, only on one side is the buyer, and on the other is the brand. One wants to sell or convince something, and the other has objections.
This conversation takes place in various channels, the organization of which is the responsibility of the channel communication strategy. There are all sorts of channel formats, from a video or outdoor advertising to banners on the Internet, leaflets, branding, etc.
Often, businesses think that they build communication somewhere in advertising: through leaflets, in a video, on a website, etc. In fact, they build it everywhere.
Communication is absolutely any touch or interaction of a brand with a potential client.
This includes the website, interior design, if it is, for example, a restaurant, and how the support team responds by phone, if it is some kind of service — that is, absolutely everything. And this communication should be integral, with the same tone and values. Why is this so important? People have become more complex. There is information noise, criticality, social networks have turned every second user into media. Along with the expansion of access to information, people's self-esteem and confidence in their own rightness have grown. We have begun to notice any falsehood, we are no longer so easy to deceive.
The world has changed: people used to be shown beautiful pictures and believed in them. Today people don't want pictures anymore, they want honesty.
— Besides sincerity, what other requirements are there for communication?
It is important to understand that communication does not end with the sale. People's loyalty has decreased significantly, and in order for a brand to maintain relationships with its customers, it needs to continue to invest in them.