Customers buy to relieve some sort of pain, or fill a need. Sometimes that pain is real, the need genuine, and sometimes it just takes the form of a psychological itch that needs scratching.
Whatever the form, source or type of the pain, nobody buys without it, so your product is medicine for that pain.
Why don’t you tell them that more often?
Be clear: ‘This product is for people who……..‘
Many years ago, I was the marketing manager of the Dairy Foods division of the then Australian owned Dairy farmers Ltd. We marketed Ski yogurt which had been swamped by the launch of Yoplait. Good advertising, packaging innovation, and a good product had massively increased yoghurt consumption, with Yoplait taking all the benefit.
The manufacturing process installed to produce Yoplait ensured that there were no discrete fruit pieces in the final product. It may have been strawberry yogurt, but the product was completely homogeneous. The process Dairy Farmers installed was different, and we could produce a product with discrete and obvious fruit pieces. (Note: I would like to claim this as strategic foresight, but in fact it was good luck which we aggressively leveraged)
The core of the platform of our marketing and innovation processes became ‘Ski: for people who like to see pieces of fruit in their yoghurt’.
We never used this line, but it was implicit in everything we did.
5 years later, Ski was market leader in a market many times bigger than when Yoplait had launched. While it may not have been painful to buy a fruited yoghurt with no discrete pieces of fruit, when the offer was made, the preference for many became immediately clear.
Sadly, both brands have since lost their way. The businesses that were running them were taken over by multinationals who understood absolutely ‘didley-squat’ about brands, and the need to continue brand building investment. In the face of the aggression of the most concentrated consumer retail market in the world, they surrendered their position by stopping brand advertising and innovation, redirecting the funds to price discounting. They forgot who the products were for, and the role they played.
When Coles finally get their way there will be just one brand (in their shops)
yes, and then the manufacturers do not have those pesky consumers to market to, they just have Coles and Woolies.
What does that do to profitability??
The FMCG manufacturing enterprises in this country are a collective sandwich short of a picnic!