The Marketing ToolkitSM
How should we develop our Brand?
Products compete not only in terms of physical features but in terms of image and brand. Considering and evaluating the source of products is an inherent part of the purchase process. Success in the marketplace is enhanced by powerful competitive “Brands.”. Brands are the major differentiator among competing products. They represent a significant long-term marketing investment which is expected to provide future value. The concept “Brand” applies both to products and to their sources. Both products and firms are “branded” through their names. The Marketing Toolkit focuses on specific products in specific markets. As such it provides a platform for the exploration the branding within those competitive markets and acts as a tool to explore possible alternatives.
The underlying concept of the Marketing Toolkit is to provide a “Pervasive Marketplace Awareness” and to facilitate customer information driven business development based on affordable quantitative marketing research. The resulting Marketing Toolkits are intended to provide the “hands-on” exploration and testing of ideas. The Marketing Toolkit provides an interactive assessment environment that allows testing of brands in respect to at least four issues: (1) the importance and value of claims that underlie the product value-propositions, (2) importance of inherent risk elements, (3) beliefs in brand values, and (4) price sensitivity by product/brands.
|
What is our brand worth? Brand
equity and customer loyalty are meaningful only in terms of the price premium
or the increased share that the market gives the brand and products. The Marketing Toolkit utilizes affordable
methods to measure competitive demand and price sensitivity. This approach provides means to determine
the effective customer loyalty and brand equity based on price premiums. This is a functional view of loyalty as the
willingness to repurchase a product. |
|
||
|
|
What values
does the Firm’s Brand Convey? The firm’s
brand can be thought to be derived by the ability of the brand or the source
of the product to reduce risk and increase comfort. There are other
characteristics that are associated with brands such as identity, prestige,
and nostalgia. However, risk reduction
uniquely affects the purchase of products.
These are measured in terms of agreement with brand position
statements and the results are displayed as sets of “star-charts”. |
||
|
What should be the product value statement? Position
(claim) statements represent the
value propositions in terms of simple expressions. These are usually assembled as “clauses”
with at least a subject (often implied), an action and a result. For the purposes of positioning, they are
often presented as “tag-lines”. They
should be statements of what the product “does and is”. The Marketing Toolkit evaluates claims in
terms of their importance, salience (performance) and their competitive
advantage as shown on the specified Quadrant Map. |
|
||
|
|
How are the claims associated with the competitive products? In developing the value-propositions, not only is importance and salience critical but we need to understand how the claims drive product position. This is shown on the Perceptual Map of claims provided by the marketing toolkit. It shows the relative similarity among products associated with the claims that drive the positions. |
||
|
Applications of the Marketing Toolkit · Overall · Branding |
|
||
|
CDS |
For more information on developing Marketing Toolkits: Eugene B. Lieb Custom Decision Support, LLC (831) 854-2256 |
||
