Are You Selling a Product or a Solution?
Brand purpose and value creation are two things that go hand in hand for a successful and sustainable business. A business does not sustain for long, based purely on the sole purpose of making money, instead of solving problems.
The former can capture a market quickly in the short term to capitalize on a specific trend or lowballing the competition with an attractive pricing or promotional incentive, but the latter will help the business with real customer value creation.
This is easier said than done of course, similar to carving out your brand purpose and why customers should care about you. Actually, they don’t and they don’t have to. They care about themselves and the value you bring to them, which in turn is also why your brand purpose is relevant to their needs and/or wants.
Many brands simply talk too much about themselves and how good they are. This is passe and no one cares, really. Your customers want to know why you are good for them. Period.
Many brands are also simply selling a product and it’s obvious when they just call out the product’s features but not their intrinsic benefits for their customers and how it solves their problems.
E.g. - if you are a tire company:
if you’re selling a product, you might say things like - we sell tires for your cars. Our tires are made of quality rubber made to last. Buy now for xx% discount for a limited time period.
If you’re selling a solution, you might say things like - we are the reason mummy and daddy can drive home safe during wet weather or we can save you up to xx% in annual cost since our wheels are made to last.
The above is just a generic example with the second point highlighting potential customer pain points around:
concerns with road safety and enhanced protection against wet weather road conditions where cars are more likely to skid and get into accidents
concerns with costs in maintaining their cars and saving them the hassle of having to swap out their tires too often
There could be more pain points thus it’s critical to first understand the problem you are trying to solve for on behalf of your target customers. Selling a product means they are solving your problem instead by lining your coffers but you are simply enticing them for the short term to get a quick purchase. It doesn’t always work for the discerning customer and your competition can easily out-do you with a better discount.
When you move on to think about value creation and solution selling, it changes the narrative and you become 100% focused on addressing your customers’ needs. You start thinking broader as well what else you can add to your slew of products and services that can more holistically address their pain points.
It’s not as simply as bundling a bunch of products and calling it a fancy name as that is ultimately still product pushing; worse, it’s pushing a bunch of products now that might not even be what they want or need.
It involves insights from customers and non customers. It includes consumer trends, their purchasing behaviour, feedback and proactive research to really tease out useful insights. It’s not a bunch of your internal stakeholders sitting down and narrating what they think. It requires empathy as well as a genuine interest in consumer behaviour.
So, are you selling a product or a solution?
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Why Your Employees Can Be Your Best Brand Ambassadors
Today’s post is back to one of my favorites around employer branding, social media profiling and how some companies are still under utilizing it.
In the aspect of social media profiling and using it for brand, I personally find B2B companies slightly more advanced, especially in the LinkedIn space as compared to B2C. B2C brands have been largely posting more entertainment type of content when it comes to employer related branding efforts or lots and lots of corporate social responsibility types of content. Photos of tree planting, employees walking or running or swimming or all three for charity, shaking hands with the local government officials, sharing the limelight on some customer events and then some…
B2B companies do that too of course but they do also often go a step further to empower their employees more to be their brand advocates. This is often done through their own subject matter experts or key opinion leaders aka KOLs in the original context that share their perspectives of company updates, happenings around their industry or sometimes, around the world.
They also empower their employees with content that they have produced as part of their content strategy, enabling them to share through social media advocacy tools. LinkedIn used to have a function that enables that called “LinkedIn Elevate” that I have helped companies implement previously. They retired it in 2020 but integrated a similar function onto LinkedIn’s “My Company” tab and allows for admins of the page to recommend organic posts and curate content for other employees to share. Other social media content management platforms like Hootsuite and, SproutSocial have the same functions.
Usually, the folks who hold the golden key to social guardrails and policies for employees are marketing and communications, corporate communications or sometimes even human resource. While there is no right or wrong, I personally think all parties need to hold joint ownership of the policy and enablement of their employees in the right way.
Most companies are still way too cautious about employee advocacy or rigid on policies around what their employees can share, some going as far as wanting to clear every single post, dictate every single post or simply only allowing selected employees of certain seniority to post on their social pages. They often are also ignorant (maybe too blissfully) that not all senior level employees have either time, actual interest, interesting views or sufficient “social clout” versus some other employees who might have one or all of the above.
My personal belief is that every employee has the potential to be your next brand ambassador on social and should be encouraged, empowered and enabled in the right way to share posts on activities your company has participated in publicly, views related to their professional field and/or the industry your company is specializing in. This can be done with varying levels of review and control instead of just clamping down with a hard “no” out of fear.
If this is new to your company, you can start small with curated key messages and posts they can use, though that to me is becoming almost too infancy in nature and looking like boring corporate spiel. Classic examples are when you see employees all copying and pasting the exact same message and photos and posting on their own LinkedIn/other social accounts without even bothering to add their own one or two liners. It’s almost like robots have taken over the control of their accounts and helping to spam the social platform with the exact same thing - next!
It’s not rocket science actually to come up with your own thoughts, even if you are not as good in writing, at least it comes from your head and heart. It’s about sincerity and being authentic when it comes to content and social content.
Some guiding principles for employees and companies to consider are:
Is this sharing something that will be helpful for your network and their network to know?
Will it cause unnecessary pain, conflict or worse, tensions in race, religion, creed and culture?
Is it harmful to someone’s reputation if you share it? If so, do you have facts to back it and how is it helpful for others to know about this?
Will it inspire others to learn and benefit from the learning in a positive way?
Imagine if your parents, siblings, partner or best friend or someone you profoundly respect and care about were to read it; would it be something they would be proud or supportive of?
Think about it the next time your splurge thousands on some KOLs; look within your employee network to see if there isn’t already some who can be your true brand ambassador and KOL. Afterall, if they work for you, they should genuinely like, support and believe in what you offer as a value proposition, correct?
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and Fractional CMO for other C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Identifying an Addressable Need
I recently came across an analysis by someone showcasing the success of the oat milk brand called Oatly and how they created a need that led to their success.
I have a slightly different take on Oatly’s success in that they didn’t create a need but rather, they identified an addressable need in the consumer market, developed their product to suit the addressable market and designed their packaging and campaign that speaks to the addressable market.
Why is it addressable and why is it not a need creation in their case?
First of all, looking at the fundamental principles of the hierarchy of needs, oat milk in itself is not new. Oatly was not the one who first came out with Oat milk as an alternative to other plant milk varieties that are not from nuts, legumes or fruits. People don’t need Oatly as yet another oat milk alternative. Even for the use in beverages, especially coffee drinks for example, Oatly is not the first entrant in this market.
If you look at the consumer and fast moving consumer good space. there aren’t that many products that are really needs based in this modern day and age. Ask yourself in all seriously as a consumer, do you really need to have say a burger or a pizza or that soft drink? For such cases, what brands and companies are creating is a want and not so much a need, which makes it a lot harder of course.
How we can take a step further however to see if these wants actually can be addressed at a deeper layer, going into the consumer psyche and how we think, behave and act, perhaps there is an addressable need tagged to that specific want. For example, consumer A, let’s call him Billy, wants to eat pizza because it makes him feel good and why does it make him feel good? It reminded him of his grandma who used to make really nice pizzas for him when she’s still around. It makes him feel safe, warm and loved whenever he thinks about pizza now. The feeling of loved, security and safety is a need and not a want as we all know.
This is where the fundamental need that can be addressed by a company who wants to give their consumers the same warm, fuzzy, safe and feelings of love with their pizzas is more likely to win over consumers and build a sustainable brand versus a company that just serves pizzas to make money from pizza lovers.
In Oatly’s case, they identified an addressable want by consumers who are avid coffee drinkers who might fall into a few categories:
1) those who are lactose intolerant or vegan or just prefer not to take dairy with their coffee but yet prefer not to have black coffee
2) those who in 1) but are allergic to nuts or don’t like the taste and thus have been relying on other plant milks like soy or coconut
3) those falling into 1) and 2) but who don’t quite like the tastes of other current plant milk types available
Looking at the wants and preferences of the consumers, we can also look at what are the underlying needs of the consumers who don’t take dairy and prefer plant milk in general that are being addressed. For example, it might be a feeling of being healthier, which is more basic survival or a feeling that they are doing their part in supporting the rights of animals, which is more altruistic or self actualization.
I find that doing an extensive mapping by going back to basics of what your target consumers want and need helps to better identify what is that addressable need that you as a brand or company can cater for ultimately to form your proposition.
Going back to Oatly’s case, after they have identified the preliminary wants and needs, they would be looking at pain points their consumers are facing based on how, where and when they are consuming plant milk. In this case, oat milk is not new to the market, including in the coffee shops but it is just beginning to make some headwinds. Almond was the first to lay claim and make their presence felt after soy was dominating for a while as the alternative milk for barista brewed coffees. Oatly would have studied this for a while and gotten some feedback from prospective customers who are avid drinkers of coffee paired with plant milk, once they decided this would be a good place to target in terms of their distribution network.
They would need to consider not just the taste of their product when brewed with coffee but the price point as well both on the consumer side and the business side, meaning the cafe owners who will be buying the stocks from them before they developed their barista edition oat milk. If there are already a few other plant milk or early entrant oat milk varieties being supplied, what would be that key differentiator so Oatly can win? They would need to think about product variations to cater for standalone oat milk drinkers versus coffee drinkers who choose plant milk over dairy.
At this point, it wouldn’t just be the packaging. It would be taste, quality, price and ability to retain their flavour or even their flexibility in order quantities, inventory management and payment management, especially for smaller cafes.
This article is just a high level of how I personally like to work with brands as a marketer, on their positioning and campaigns. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list as there is much more to think about. But for starters, as marketers, we should always go back to the fundamental principles of the consumer psyche, marketing principles, proposition and business viability when working on our campaigns.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Why Brand Management is Everyone’s Responsibility
Something I’m sure that has every marketing leader or brand leader tearing their hair out besides seeing their brand scores tank is when they get all the blame for it. If only brand preference building and management is as easy as putting out your brand ad on a big bus, taxi or whichever platform that gets as many eyeballs as possible. If so, why not just put it on a huge sky scrapper (hey that’s done before actually!).
Such tactics (I call them tactics and not strategies) work better for “will you marry me” types of wedding proposals but to build brand preference, it takes way more than that. Similar to good customer experience management, brand management takes the whole organization, including your client facing employees and your client facing touchpoints to help uplift your brand.
Firstly, your brand needs to serve a purpose and address a need or multiple needs for your defined target customers. Secondly, you need to know what differentiates you from your competitors even if you are selling the same things. Just like Pepsi and Coca Cola, both are cola drinks but both have their differentiating factors and ultimately, appeal. Thirdly, is your brand voice, message and identity that you are bringing to life through your marketing campaigns, news about your organization, things that your client facing teams are telling your clients or prospects, right down to the things you do in the broader public facing community. Finally, you need to clearly define as well as upkeep the key channels you are positioning your brand on that serve as a communication touchpoint with your target audience.
Many business leaders think the buck stops with the marketing campaigns but the trickiest part about brand management is how to make your target audience see you the way you want to be perceived. This approach leads to a dystopia state of brand reputation and perception as you will see almost conflicting activities and messages being shared from your organization by various business functions working in silos but not realizing they are all trying to steer the same ship to avoid hitting an iceberg. This is because everyone ends up trying to chart their own course to reach the same destination instead of playing to their strengths and working as a team.
There is nothing more dysfunctional than multiple teams trying to launch different variations of what they think your brand stands for in order to meet their own KPIs (key performance indicators). A tactical offer, is not a brand management strategy, a segment representation is not a brand management strategy and a campaign telling people how good you are is certainly not a brand management strategy but all this will affect the perception of your brand. Companies need to take a giant step back to reflect on what you are trying to position out there in terms of your brand identity and whether that still stays true to the fundamental reason you deserve to exist as a brand that customers care about.
The third and last part of the brand management aspect is actually also the hardest to maintain. You have to make sure your client facing touchpoints are keeping up with the demand from a tech, process and user design perspective so nothing falls through the cracks for your customers trying to engage with you. Concurrently, you need to have a joint-up approach in what you do and say to your target audience, including the timeliness and/or appropriateness of certain actions or messages. It goes beyond having a good crisis communications protocol.
For example, if your digital platform or servicing touchpoint is having a breakdown, you definitely do not want your key spokesperson to go out with a media commentary boasting about how great your digital or client servicing capabilities are or run an ad showcasing “seamless digital or client servicing capabilities”.
It’s more important to ensure business functions are working collaboratively as part of business-as-usual in keeping each other abreast, including your brand, marketing and communications team when something breaks or if they are preparing for a major enhancement so they can pre-empt the customer impact for the better or for the worse. Your management meetings should have a cadence to exchange such information so it can be cascaded to working group level to formulate a pre-emptive and proactive communications and customer management approach.
Simply said, the brand is the soul of the company and everyone is responsible for brand and reputation management but in the right way and not just checking off a list.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.