Hearing marketing referred to as a science may seem a bit strange to most. However, once you really understand the nature of marketing you begin to understand how applying a scientific principal to it really does fit. Most people consider marketing as a subjective, lawless art that is born strictly from inspiration and creativity, and though these do have a large place in marketing, the fundamentals are, and always will be a relatively strict science.
The first thing to understand is that marketing, graphic design and copy all follow rules. There are many people who emulate what they see and call it marketing, but to create effective strategies, you really need to understand the fundamental rules, and how they apply to any given situation.
When starting a marketing campaign, it helps to start with a hypothetico-deductive approach. This process, commonly known as the scientific approach, is simply: Consider the problem, Form a Conjecture, Deduce predictions, Test. For this article, I will share the basic concepts of each of these phases as they relate to marketing strategy.
Step 1: Consider the problem:
In marketing sense, when we say consider the problem, the true thing we are considering is how to reach a specific target. Many times marketing attempts to appeal to far to broad a spectrum of people, or attempts to direct to an over tapped demographic. We often hear about large companies targeting campaigns toward specific groups.
An example would be if I was trying to market a furniture store, a broad and over-tapped market. The common method to appeal to such a market would be to attempt to appeal to everyone, by promising lower prices. When we target such an over-tapped and broad market, we must become aware of consumer skepticism. Over-tapped markets typically have a very high level of skepticism, and most likely, people will not buy into your campaign.
To overcome this level of skepticism you end up having to escalate your promises. So the campaign moves away from the Low prices, and moves toward the desperate campaign. A desperate campaign seems to practically beg people to come into the business, and in this case it would be through the going out of business, or all inventories must go sales.
This attempt will likely still fail, as this market is so over-tapped that even these desperate campaigns are met with very high consumer skepticism. There really is little a furniture company, in this example, can do to appeal to a broad market effectively. However, a niche market may be just waiting for someone to appeal to them.
The first thing to do is to really understand the products, the company and the primary customer demographic. This can be done in a simple method, or though data-collection and analysis. Obviously the latter trends toward far more accurate information, but it can take considerable time. Often it’s a good idea to do a simple method for rapid campaigns, and begin analysis toward future campaigns.
Once you know who the customers are, and what is special about the business or products you are marketing, you can begin to narrow down some demographics. For this example we will say that the furniture store sells modern furniture at liquidation prices. The furniture itself is unique and seems to appeal to a younger demographic (18-26 years of age), and most people who buy this furniture do not have children.
Now we can begin narrowing down our target. To do this, we simply look at all demographics that fit our paradigm and compare them based on current market trends, competition, and probability. This leads us to step 2.
Step 2: Form a Conjecture:
Simply stated we are building a theory here. You may have some idea of who would most likely not only go to, but purchase from our furniture store, but you haven’t yet figured out exactly who to reach and how to reach them. The act of narrowing down our target is always theory, but with a little research, thought, and a touch of inspiration, that theory can become quite strong.
In our example we found that the majority of buyers were 18-26 with no children. This is still a pretty wide demographic and I wouldn’t try to market to all of them. Why? Because we still are met with a high amount of consumer skepticism. For example, if I tried to market hip low cost furniture to this age group, they will consider that it would be easier, and safer to continue going to their currently preferred store for their purchases.
We need to dig a little deeper to figure out what will get a good chunk of this demographic to not only visit the furniture store, but to make purchases. Research can be a powerful tool here. There are many consumer surveys, and trends that give us exactly this information. To go even further we can begin surveys in the store, or in public places asking people what helps them make their buying decisions. This information would then be gathered and the most common responses, based on our demographic, would be taken into account.
A powerful tool is also in the Internet. Reviewing forums and blogs about top competitors can help you understand what may be lacking. This could help you derive a strong niche. For our example, let’s say we found that many people were complaining that all modern furniture is made of plastic or resin. They want the modern look, but the comfort of fabric. Now obviously this isn’t true for the entire demographic, but it is true for a large section of it. The furniture store, by coincidence happens to sell a large selection of fabric covered modern furniture.
We now have a niche starting to form. If we could convince the people seeking fabric covered modern furniture to come and buy from this store, we would have a solid influx of new business.
But how?
That is the next trick, we have to understand primary decision makers, and respond to those as well. Cost is an issue with almost everyone, but even moreso with that demographic. So, we do want to put some mention of the low cost liquidation in there. Also, warranties, style, and quality are factors, and should be considered.
Our conjecture concludes with a solid idea of who we are targeting, how we want to get their attention and finally, what we need to gain their trust. This leads us to Step 3.
Step 3: Deduce Predictions:
We know a lot more about our campaign at this point, but we still do not have a campaign. Right now, we do have the information to get started though. We know who we want to target and we have some idea of how. We just need to plan it out, right?
Yes and no, we have a little more to do than that. This is brainstorming time, we need to consider every aspect of each idea and follow it through until we figure out what the most likely outcome will be. Again, research is a powerful tool here, but so is inspiration and intuition.
We could focus on a few key pieces of furniture and try to draw people in using the idea that this furniture represents only a fraction of what the company has to offer. The problem is, the consumer may not deduce this, and if they don’t like the few pieces, they may assume they don’t like anything the store has. On the flip side, if we show nothing, or too many things, we end up not giving the consumer enough to “wet their whistle” and get them interested. This is obviously a dilemma that we need to figure out.
We do know what the most popular items are; we also know what some of the most unique items are. From this we could build an ongoing campaign for specific pieces. We could also tie the campaign into a website that allows the consumer to browse a much larger chunk of the collection, while still working to entice them into the actual store.
Obviously I am simplifying here, but let’s say we went through the process and determined that an office chair ad would be the best thing to draw people in. We select out, 2 top sellers and 1 unique item to get people interested and build our ad around those. We still need to come up with effective imagery and copy to make the ad work.
We have to ask ourselves, what words would catch this target’s attention, what do they want to see, and how do they want to see it. Then we answer those questions, and move on to Step 4.
Step 4: Test:
Testing comes in many forms and at many points in the development process. We know what we want, to a degree, but we do not know how it should really look until we see it. This means we have to lay it out, play with the details and make it as perfect as we possibly can. There are rules still to follow though, symmetry, design, color, wording all have rules that we can use to create the optimal result.
So we test in development, then we put it out there, right? We can, but many times it’s better to develop a focus group to test your marketing before sending it out to the masses. A focus group sounds difficult, costly and time consuming, but in reality, it can be as simple as collection email addresses in your store or on your site, and sending it to those individuals and gauging the response.
Then, we begin sending it out to the masses. We compare the response to our expectations outlined in step 3 and determine, revise and possible restart based on the real time outcomes. Many marketing campaigns fail on the first try, but based on the results we can figure out what worked and what didn’t, giving us less failure for the second run, and success on later runs. It’s all about adapting, and persisting until you find the right balance for the business you are marketing.
Hopefully, from this you can see that marketing actually does require skilled thought and knowledge to be made effective. It is a science and a very complex one at that.