Recently I read this book by Philip Kotler and Fernando Trias de Bes on Lateral Marketing published by Wiley Publications. After completing the book the one word I said was WOW. The book mentions some basic problems faced by marketers today and deals with how to eliminate or at least reduce them. Every Marketing student knows Mr. Kotler and can guess how great Ideas can he deliver. So let’s see what are the great ideas discussed by him this time.
Present Market
He says, Today Market is crowded with hundreds and thousands of products of different brands. Oligopoly rules across the markets. Product life cycles have shortened. “Replace” has overtaken “Repair”. There are thousands of varieties in a given genre of product. This is a case of extreme segmentation and fragmentation.
What needs to be done?
"Creating niche is out. Mass marketing is in AGAIN".
In this era of internet and fast communication channels, one must exploit them to the extremes to reach the Target Customers.
One must think laterally before entering a market. He should make the competition irrelevant by creating blue oceans. This does not mean the fundamentals of Marketing have lost their glory, but the fact is “One should change with time”. There is something extra that needs to be added with conventional marketing techniques to grab customer attention today.
First things first. Let’s talk about coming out with newer products. One should keep in mind that customers don’t have time. They are suffering with paranoia, that they are very busy and they need everything in one thing. (To some extent it is true too.) Take the example of Malls. They developed because the customers preferred to get every thing under one roof. Take another example. Today cell phone or for that matter any other gadget or appliance comes loaded with ‘n’ number of features. This is because they want everything in one thing.
Now don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating that newer products need to contain much more features than they are doing today. That is a technological issue. (in various cases) But when Consumer Goods are concerned how will they add features in their products or when a chocolate is concerned how will they add features in the chocolate. You will say they will add varieties. But that is the problem. Already the market is flooded with varieties and brands and we here are discussing remedial action for it.
So what do we do now?
What Mr. Kotler suggests is to build cross genre functionalities in your products. A bit technical? I will explain. Take for example the case of chocolates. 90% of the chocolate market in India is ruled by Cadbury and Nestle. The rest 10% faces immense competition among players like Perfetti, Candico and the like. So how do I come out with a new product? Now what I would do is, I will think of some latent need that is now not satisfied by the current players. I will try to find out some uncomforting features of the present products. This is the thing I will exploit rather than launching a new variety in the Red Ocean. I will think of some cross genre adjustments and then and only then after doing a strong market research will I come out with a product. Even in case of market research companies are not clear as to what they want to research on and who will benefit from it. But let’s keep it for some other time.
Now what I can think of, is a product which let’s name NUTRIX. How will it be different from already existing products?
1. It will be lowest on calories. (discomfort in people, while eating high calorific chocolates)
2. It will have the same taste as the cocoa and chocolate based chocolates
3. It will be Highly Nutritious. (Now that will be my USP. As it is the latent need in the people to have the fun of eating chocolates and still enjoy the benefit of having something nutritious)
4. I will position it as, suppose a snack for adults and energy supplement for children. (Thus virtually forcing parents to give my chocolates to children whenever they ask for one. As for adults they may have the chocolate as a Brunch or as a desert in dinner)
Now my product is competing with not only chocolate industry, but also with snack industry, sweets industry, health supplements industry and so on. But the share it snatches from them will be so little individually that they won’t object to it. But accumulating small shares from a large number of industries will give me a large chunk of money. Thus I would be successful in carving a new market for myself.
Thus the ingredients of Lateral Thinking and Lateral Marketing have to be inculcated in our marketing strategies if we really want to make the competition irrelevant and enjoy a great earning experience.
The second part is using modern marketing in our marketing strategies. That we will be discussing from time to time, as this blog is meant for basically those kind of issues.
Sooooooo…. It’s time to go again. Will be back soon with something worthwhile to share.
Till then GOOD LUCK …
