What is marketing, and why do these people try to trick you in most cases - educational program

Hooked me one piece of a discussion about marketing today on Habré. What is it, how is it, how is it for IT. Everything is good there except for one thing - there is no understanding that marketing is not a special shaman in a project that twists something there, but a fig, in which everyone should take an active part. In IT, not in IT - it doesn't matter. Therefore, I will tell you why.

Imagine a small hairdresser on the ground floor of a residential building. Surely you have such a number. She has a very limited circle of potential customers - these are residents of the nearest houses. Marketing is about making most of them cut there. Each jamb is a lost customer (and there’s nowhere to take a new one, remember?). Each success is a minimum client for 5-6 years, that is, not one haircut, but many at once.

On the other hand, we often observe the situation of the restaurant on the flow of tourists. The tourist will eat and will not return. The main thing is that he come in and sit down. You can cook almost a balance, you can be rude, you can lose customers right and left. The tourist will not return. You don't care about him.

So, marketing is to make the product and the customer come together. In my understanding - to go through the whole chain from the development and production of a product to its sale and use for several years. Find all the places in this chain where you can do better - and do it. Work with people within the company so that they understand why all this and why.

Marketing is Sales

This is one of the most painful points. The fact is that marketing most often does not think in terms of the categories of the company as a whole (despite the fact that the same grandfather Kotler bequeathed this way). The reason is very simple. The marketer or marketer is paid for the monthly KPI (goals).

An example . You know, I sell board games. I can increase the number of transactions right here and now, for example, announcing a sale and sending annoying SMS. This is an extremely effective technique in the short term. For a week, I would make a monthly sales plan.

Only there is one jamb. This would undermine the relationship between me and those people who trust us. Speaking in an outrageous language, between a brand and an audience. The quality of the audience, the conversion on all channels will drop immediately, the return on customers, the average number of items in a check and the average number of purchases per year will decrease quite quickly. Because the next time I say that the game is so awesome - it will be an attempt to vparit something, not a recommendation that you can trust.

Once you abuse the trust of the audience, you’ll begin to quickly move to the point that it will be cheaper to attract new people than to maintain the existing base. And then attracting new people will become the only possible channel, because a person will make one purchase and run away. And most markets are such that in the two to three year term this means being on the margin border.

What's the matter?

The fact is that every day and every second a marketer has a choice whether to compromise in search of profit or to keep a line. It’s good when there is a mission, guideline or standard that cannot be avoided (although, for example, explaining to a person in Russia what a “mission” is is almost as difficult as explaining that you can’t throw garbage on the sidewalk).

When there is no warm breathing of a standard or a supervisor in the back of the head, you can lie. The only border is in the head of the marketer. Lie and scream louder. Hence all the noisy companies with soulful slogans with asterisks. Hence the strange loyalty programs. Hence the investment in advertising, often exceeding the cost of production.

The example is very simple: when you stand in a store in front of two packs of dumplings for 150 and 250 rubles and read the same compositions, it is unclear when you buy the expensive one for which you will pay. Maybe for the quality. Maybe for advertising and shelf space with the same quality. Maybe because the owner of the brand rightly believes that a higher price will make you think that the product is better. Maybe for the fact that the dumplings are twisted to the left: you don’t care, and someone will give any money for this.

Game with incomplete information

When I stood in front of three unfamiliar cans of sour cream in Kiev, I didn’t understand why I was paying: for the fact that my dear sour cream is guaranteed not to kill me, or simply because I am an idiot. And I will never know.

In fact, this is a classic problem from game theory - about a game with incomplete information from players. There are N producers and K buyers (where K is orders of magnitude greater than N). It is unprofitable for a dishonest producer to show information about himself to a buyer, for an honest producer it is beneficial. It’s not always profitable for the buyer to show the information about himself to the seller (otherwise, what he bought for 100 rubles can become 200 - since it is really necessary, right?).

The basic case is that the participant in the set K wants to make a choice between the participants in the set N. In the simplest case, he solves a random number from 1 to N. Hello, the first item that comes across, I'm in a hurry and I don’t care. If you don’t like it, the next time there will be a random number from 1 to N-1.

In a more complicated case, participant K begins to think according to the algorithm of the Monte Carlo group. Somewhere the composition will play, somewhere seen advertising, somewhere on the shelf, reviews and so on. Marketing works with all these weight characteristics, and where they outweigh - there randomly falls in your direction better.

In the third case, the buyer does not believe in the product, as in the last two, but in you. Only when you buy a bottle of water do you not go after it to America for the creator. It's simple, you trust the brand. Well, like, you know, you know what to expect from Tsiska and Huawei, right? The difference is obvious.

This garbage is called a brand. The brand is when Tsiska makes a new device, nobody has touched it and tested it for more than a month, and you already buy it at the data center. Because you want to believe that it is not raw and bazhenny at the exit like an old Windows without a service pack. A brand is when you know that you will receive the same warmed compound feed in all countries of the world in the Makdachny network. A brand is when you drink soda and know that it was made without the drunk plumber Vasily, who fell into his vat in boots.

Brand is not always important

Back to our restaurant on the stream. He sells a balance sheet and advertises loudly. Clients, on average, are rather dissatisfied than satisfied, but they do not care about their opinion. They will never return. The economy itself and the surrounding situation (plus competitors on the same stream) are pushing to reduce costs (Soap cook? Why?) And promise more. You will not have to answer for unrestrained promises.

This is a situation typical of the marketing of the 90s, when it was necessary to scream louder and look for sucker. Moreover, everyone on the stream could become a sucker. Some, by the way, still live that way.

Let's look at the natural development of the situation with restaurants on the stream, using a perfect example.

A week ago, I returned from Kalambaki, a small town in Greece for 5 thousand inhabitants. A sea of ​​tourists, 40 restaurants and cafes, a bunch of small shops. The city is one long walking street at 1800 meters, beyond which there is no life. Hotels and the train station are at its southern end. Throughout the city, only one restaurant is marked on Google Maps. Guess exactly where it is located?



Why are there no other restaurants on the city map? The answer is quite obvious - because they do not need new customers. They already have a good load and good profit. It’s hard to think. On the other hand, our restaurant is clearly experiencing problems with customers. And he, in order not to fly out of the market, begins to look for ways to attract new people. In our case, the border is very clear - it is on Google Maps and Apple maps, but there are no others. Of course, he, most likely, will do everything to get into the Tripadvisor, arrange with mini-hotels without his own kitchen and so on. You can increase profits by reducing the cost of production of dishes, changing the structure of the check (a tastier menu), expanding the range (new desserts and so on). But it all works in developed markets in a situation where the client has a choice.

I repeat : being honest is not profitable here. Advertising will not work. There is only one important factor - the location closer to the stream. You see this situation in almost every city with tourists almost certainly.

The economy is beautiful in that it is regulated by itself. The government of the country, not going to poison tourists, has established sanitary standards. The owners of the premises raise the rent on the stream (the rental price tends to income after taxes of the enterprise). Tourists exchange reviews and sometimes go to our distant restaurant. And each passenger there is 10 people per stream, since rent is lower. We do not need a full flow of people. We need enough loading - only "ours".

In this ecosystem, obviously, everyone has their own niche. Restaurants on the stream compete in the volume of screeching (here a man in another similar city quite seriously declares that he has the best ice cream in Europe):



Restaurants farther from the stream play in price competition (it’s cheaper there), in competition in quality (reviews, maps) and in partisan methods (negotiate with guides).

Finding the best place for a restaurant, shaping its strategy, choosing a cook, tasting all dishes, decorating the hall, menu and choosing equipment, advertising and PR, working with arrogant visitors and returning forgotten things to the tourist’s home country - this is marketing. And the importance of each factor depends on only two things: the owner’s life values ​​and the profitability of the strategy for the current market.

Honest marketing

Available. Profitable. Highly. The boundary condition is to think with a long-term strategy. Build relationships with people as friends, not customers. Many stories are not from our reality, some are from Russia, but in strange markets. But I know exactly what I'm talking about. In Russia, to my great pleasure, companies are slowly realizing that being honest is beneficial. And it’s nice. But I still go for groceries like a minefield. And he believed in the promises of mobile operators only in South Africa. When buying a phone, I want to see not the clock speed, but to understand whether it will last two days without charging or not. When I take travel insurance, I’m ready to pay more, but to know that they will return the money to me without question if they do not give me a visa and they don’t beat my brain for three weeks.

In the east there is a terrible curse - "You have the soul of a merchant." He is often misunderstood. Trade is an art in many countries. Bargaining is aesthetics and a kind of insanely cool game. But the soul of a merchant is when a person is ready to deceive a person for profit.

Here is an example . If the ram is lame, but the dealer did not say, this is not a hoax. This is part of the game "I did not look." Maybe you didn’t take it, but for the sake of the skin. The line is thin. But if you don’t check something with the available means, for example, when the buyer asks if there were infected sheep in the herd, and the merchant says no, there weren’t, although they were (but this one doesn’t seem to cough) - this is already cheating. Whoever deceives is the soul of a merchant.

So, marketing is the formation of such a product, sale and after-sales relationship, when sales bring you maximum profit. And in our game, under the boundary conditions of a long party, it is beneficial to be open and honest.

Plus, do not forget about the identities of those who manage the company. Our profit is in second place in priorities. She is important, very important. But on the first - the pleasure of life. And to enjoy life and do dumb things are slightly different things. For us.

I understand that without practice, everything somehow looks too emotional and sublime. Do you want a series of posts about my practice (not only in Mosigre) that can form a set of marketing knowledge for your project?