The Marketing Mix and the Buyer’s Journey

February 22, 2010 By David Crankshaw

The activities in your Marketing and Sales Cycle that align with the buyer’s journey are only part of the Marketing Mix. What are the other variables in the mix? How do your Sales Cycle activities fit into the larger mix?

The idea of the Marketing Mix was first used by Neil Borden in 1949. Then in 1960 Jerome McCarthy classified the four P’s as the primary variables in the marketing mix: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place.

A year later Albert Frey suggested a division of the mix that maps well to the model of the Buyer’s Journey. He divided the variables into two groups, the Offering and the Process.

According to Wikipedia,

“The “offering” consists of the product, service, packaging, brand, and price. The “process” or “method” variables included advertising, promotion, sales promotion, personal selling, publicity, distribution channels, marketing research, strategy formation, and new product development.”

To create the Offering requires understanding your resources and your market. You make strategic decisions about which markets to target and how to deploy your financial and operational resources. The variables interact with each other – choices about product affect your pricing, decisions about brand image impact your packaging and product design. Once you have made decisions about the mix in the Offering, your flexibility to make changes is limited.

Marketing Mix - The Offering

Marketing Mix - The Offering

The variables in the mix for the Process are more like tools in your tool chest. At each stage of the buyer’s journey you use the tools that will best communicate, educate, and create value for the buyer at that stage. You measure the results from the use of your tools and have a lot of flexibility to make changes.

Marketing Mix - The Process

Marketing Mix - The Process

Filed Under: Buyer's Journey Tagged With:

The Curse of Knowledge

February 10, 2010 By David Crankshaw

reverse-the-curseEngineers. Business executives. Marketing specialists.

You’ve spent years learning your profession. Honing your craft. Accumulating experience.

You communicate with your peers in a specialized language. You use the abstractions of shorthand, codes, and acronyms that make communication faster and more efficient.

But the benefit of speaking in abstractions with each other becomes a curse when speaking with someone outside your group. Chip and Dan Heath call it the Curse of Knowledge.

Experts forget what it was like not to understand their field, to be new. And the more they rely on their language, the more frustrating it is for their audience.

Whether you are talking to a customer, teaching a class, or explaining to your mother “what you do”, your tendency will be to communicate to others as if you are talking to one of your peers. And then, surprise, your audience won’t understand or remember what you say.

The cure for this curse?

Once you have clarified your core message and made it as simple as possible, then you want the audience to:

  1. Pay attention – Your audience needs to believe that you share its values, that you know what you are talking about, and that you have its interest in mind. Speak in their language and vocabulary. Use specific examples to demonstrate your character.
  2. Understand and remember your idea – Go to your audience and its beliefs. Simplify your message and make it more concrete. Emphasize real-world examples instead of concepts. Make your facts and statistics accessible. Tell a story.
  3. Take action – Appeal to their emotion. Tell a story with you in it that makes the audience feel it is experiencing the scene with you. Describe in detail through your story what they can expect if they act.
Filed Under: Content Marketing Tagged With: ,