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

Hooked me one piece of the discussion about marketing today in 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 who is twisting something there, but a fig man, 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 first floor of a residential building. Surely you have such a number. She has a very limited number of potential customers - they are residents of nearby homes. Marketing is to make sure that most of them cut their hair there. Each joint is a lost customer (and there is no place to take a new one, remember?). Each success is a client for 5-6 years minimum, that is, not one haircut, but a lot at once.
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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 - that he came in and sat down. You can cook almost a soup, 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 the product to its sale and use within a few years. Find all the places in this chain where you can do better - and do it. Work with people inside the company so that they understand why all this and why.

Marketing is sales

This is one of the sickest theses. The fact is that marketing most often thinks far from the categories of the company as a whole (despite the fact that the same grandfather Kotler bequeathed that way). The reason is very simple. The marketer or marketer is paid for executing KPIs (goals) by months.

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

Only there is one cant. It would undermine the relationship between me and the people who trust us. Speaking izhopa language - between the brand and the audience. The quality of the audience, the conversion on all channels will immediately fall, the customer return rate, the average amount of goods in a check and the average number of purchases per year will decrease quite quickly. Because when next time I say that the game is so awesome, it will be an attempt to push something, not a recommendation that can be trusted.

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

What's the matter?

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

When there is no warm breath of a standard or a supervising person in the back of the head, you can lie. The only frontier is in the marketer’s head. Lie and shout louder. Hence all the noisy companies with heartfelt slogans with asterisks. Hence the weird loyalty programs. Hence, investment in advertising, often exceeding the cost of production of goods.

The example is very simple: when you are standing in the store in front of two packs of dumplings for 150 and 250 rubles and you read the same compositions, it is not clear when buying expensive, what you will pay for. Maybe for the quality. Maybe for advertising and a place on the shelf with the same quality. Maybe for the fact that the owner of the brand rightly believes that the higher price will make you think that the product is better. Maybe because the dumplings are twisted to the left: you don't care, and someone will give any money for it.

A game with incomplete information

When I stood in front of three unfamiliar banks of sour cream, I did not understand why I was crying: for the fact that my dear sour cream is not guaranteed to kill me, or simply because I am an idiot. And never know it.

In fact, this is a classic problem from game theory - about a game with incomplete information among players. Plays N manufacturers and K buyers (where K is orders of magnitude greater than N). It is unprofitable for the dishonest manufacturer to show information about itself to the customer, and for an honest producer it is beneficial. It is not always profitable for the buyer to show the information about himself to the seller (otherwise, what he bought for 100 rubles could become 200 - if he really needed it, right?).

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

In a more complicated case, participant K starts thinking using the Monte Carlo group algorithm. Somewhere will play the composition, somewhere seen advertising, somewhere on the shelf, reviews and so on. With all these weight characteristics, marketing works, and where they outweigh - there, randomly in your direction drops out better.

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

This garbage is called a brand. The brand is when Tsisk is making a new device, nobody has touched it yet and have not tested it for more than a month, and you already buy it in the data center. Because you want to believe that it is not raw and bazheny at the exit as the old Windows without a service pack. A brand is when you know that you will receive the same heated feed in all countries of the world in the McDachny network. A brand is when you drink soda and you know what it was done without the drunk plumber Vasily who fell in his boots in a vat.

Brand is not always important

Let's return to our restaurant on stream. He sells gruel and is advertised loudly. Clients, on average, are more likely to be dissatisfied than satisfied, but they don’t 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 to the cook? Why?) And promise more. For unchecked promises do not have to answer.

This is a situation characteristic of the marketing of the 90s, when it was necessary to shout louder and look for a sucker. And the chode could be everyone on the stream. Some, by the way, still live like this.

Let's look at the natural development of the situation with restaurants on the stream on an excellent example.

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



Why are there no other restaurants on the map of the city? The answer is obvious enough - because they do not need new customers. They have a good load and a 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 to Tripadweiser, negotiate with mini-hotels without his kitchen, and so on. You can increase profits by reducing the cost of production of dishes, changes in the structure of the check (more delicious 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. In our city, the most effective strategy is to make the tourist turn towards you from a rich stream.

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

The economy is beautiful in that it regulates itself. The government of the country, which is not going to hound tourists, has set sanitary standards. Owners of premises raise rentals on a stream (the rent price tends to income after an enterprise’s taxes). Tourists exchange reviews and sometimes go to our faraway restaurant. And every passenger there is 10 people on the stream, since the rent is lower. We do not need a full flow of people. We need enough load - only “ours”.

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



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

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

Honest marketing

Available. Profitable. Highly. The boundary condition is to think of a long-term strategy. Build relationships with people like friends, not customers. Many stories are not from our reality, some - 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 is nice. But for groceries, I still walk like a minefield. And the promises of mobile operators believed only in South Africa. When buying a phone, I want to see not a clock frequency, 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 without any questions if they don’t give me a visa, and they don’t take part in the brain for three weeks.

In the east, there is a terrible curse - "You have a merchant's soul." 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, and the trader did not say - this is not deception. This is part of the game "did not look myself." Maybe you did not take it, but for the sake of the skin. The brink is thin. But if you check something with the available means it will not work out - for example, when the buyer asks if there were any infected sheep in the herd, and the trader will say that no, it was not, although there were (but this one, like, does not cough) cheating Who deceives - that soul has a merchant.

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

Plus you should not forget about the identity of those who manage the company. Our profit is in second place in priorities. It 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 is somehow too emotional and sublime looks. Do you want a cycle of posts about my practice (not only in Mosigra), which can develop into a set of marketing knowledge for your project?