The following is the fifth in a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Crossing the Chasm.
One of the most important functions of marketing isn’t viral and it isn’t advertising and no, it’s not creative slogals. Rather it’s in the fundamental 4Ps taught in every Marketing 101 class: Product.
In order to win the marketplace, you must wire the marketplace. According to Moore, “For a given target customer and a given application, create a marketplace in which your product is the only reasonable buying proposition. That starts… with targeting markets that have a compelling reason to buy your product. The next step is ensuring that you have a monopoly over fulfilling the reason to buy.”
Moore brings Theodore Levitt’s model of product defined in The Marketing Imagination.
- Generic Product – what’s shipped in the box
- Expected Product – what the consumer expects – the minimum configuration of products and services necessary to have any chance of achieving the buying objective
- Augmented Product – The fleshed out product achieving maximum chance of achieving the buying objectives – all the products and services that are related
- Potential product – The product’s room for growth
Pragmatists buy the whole product.
According to Moore, “Whole product planning is the centerpiece for developing a market domination strategy.” He continues, “Winning the whole product battle means winning the war.”
In the following model, there are only two categories: (1) what’s shipped (the generic product) and (2) what else the customers need in order to achieve their compelling reason to buy. Moore calls this the “marketing promise” made to win the sale. Failure to meet this promise in a B2B marketplace has serious consequence, this isn’t fluff or mumbo jumbo but a promise that must be delivered on.
This can, of course, be delivered with partners and additional vendors over a period of time. You don’t need to provide everything yourself but you do need to create the whole package.
