What is Marketing and Why These People Try to Cheat You Most of the Time

I got hooked on one piece of marketing discussion today on Habre. What it is, how it is, how it is for IT. Everything there is good except for one thing – there is no understanding that marketing is not a special shaman in a project that spins something there, but a fig in which everyone should actively participate. IT, not IT, it doesn't matter. So I'll tell you why.

Imagine a small barbershop on the first floor of a residential building. I'm sure you've got them around. She has a very limited range of potential customers - these are residents of the nearest houses. Marketing is making sure that most of them get their hair cut there. Each joint is a lost customer (and there’s no new one to pick up, remember?). Each success is a client for 5-6 years at least, that is, not one haircut, but a lot at once.

On the other hand, we often see the situation of the restaurant in the flow of tourists. The tourist will eat and never come back. The main thing is for him to come in and sit down. You can cook almost a balanda, you can be rude, you can lose customers to the right and left. Tourist's not coming back. You don't care about him.

Marketing is about making the product and the customer come together. My understanding is to go through the entire chain from the development and production of a product to its sale and use for several years. Find all the places in the chain where you can do better and do it. Work with people inside the company to understand why 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 this way). The reason is very simple. A marketer or marketer is paid to complete KPIs (goals) by months.

Example. You know, I sell board games. I can increase the number of transactions right here and now, for example, by announcing a sale and sending annoying SMS. This is a very effective method in the short term. In a week, I would make a monthly sales plan.

Only one joint. It would undermine the relationship between me and the people who trust us. Speaking ass language – between the brand and the audience. The quality of the audience, conversions on all channels will immediately fall, the return of customers, the average number of goods in the check and the average number of purchases per year will decrease quite quickly. Because the next time I say that the game is so awesome, it will be an attempt to sell something, not a recommendation that can be trusted.

Once you abuse your audience’s trust, you’ll quickly move toward something that’s cheaper to attract new people than to maintain an existing base. And then attracting new people will be the only possible channel, because the person will make one purchase and run away. And most markets are such that in a two- to three-year perspective, that means being on a margin.

What is it?
Every day and every second, a marketer has a choice to compromise in search of profit or to hold the line. It’s good to have a mission, a guideline, or a standard that you can’t walk away from (although, for example, explaining to a person in Russia what “mission” is is almost as difficult as explaining that you can’t throw garbage on the sidewalk).

When you don't have a standard warm breath or a watchdog in the back of your head, you can lie. The only limit is in the head of the marketer. Lie and shout louder. Hence all the noisy companies with soulful slogans with stars. Hence the strange loyalty programs. Hence, investments in advertising, often exceeding the cost of production of goods.

The example is very simple: when you stand in a store in front of two packs of dumplings for 150 and 250 rubles and read the same compositions, it is unclear, buying an expensive one, what you will pay for. Maybe for the quality. Maybe for advertising and shelf space with the same quality. Maybe because the brand owner rightly believes that a 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 of incomplete information
When I stood in front of three unfamiliar cans of sour cream in Kiev, I did not understand why I was paying: for the fact that expensive sour cream is guaranteed not to kill me, or just for the fact that I am an idiot. I'll never know.

In fact, it's a classic game theory problem -- about a game with incomplete player information. Plays N manufacturers and K buyers (where K is orders of magnitude greater than N). It is unprofitable for a dishonest manufacturer to show information about himself to the buyer, it is profitable for an honest one. It is not always profitable for the buyer to show information about himself to the seller (otherwise, what he bought for 100 rubles can become 200 - since it is very necessary, right?).

Basic case: A participant of the set K wants to make a choice between the participants of the set N. In the simplest case, solves a random number from 1 to N. Hey, first thing I got, I'm in a hurry and I don't care. If you don’t like it, the next time it will be a random number from 1 to N-1.

In a more complex case, the participant K starts thinking by the Monte Carlo algorithm. Somewhere will play the composition, somewhere seen advertising, somewhere the location on the shelf, reviews and so on. With all these weight characteristics, marketing works, and where they outweigh – there the random in your direction falls out better.

In the third case, the buyer does not believe the product, as in the previous two, but you. It is only when you buy a bottle of water that you don't go to America to get the maker. It's simple, you trust the stamp. Well, like, you know what to expect from Ciskey and Huawei, right? The difference is obvious.

This stuff is called a brand. Brand is when Cisca makes a new device, it has not been touched or tested for more than a month, and you already buy it in the data center. Because you want to believe that it's not raw and squishy at the exit like an old window without a service pack. A brand is when you know that you will get the same heated feed in all countries of the world in the network of McDucks. Brand is when you drink soda and know that it was made without a drunken plumber Vasily, who fell in his boots in a vat.

Branding isn't always important.
Let's go back to our restaurant on the stream. He sells a balanda and advertises loudly. Customers, on average, are more dissatisfied than satisfied, but their opinions do not matter. They'll never come back. The economy and the environment (plus competitors on the same stream) are pushing costs down. Why? and promise more. Unrestrained promises will not have to be answered.

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

Let's look at the natural development of the restaurant situation on the stream in a great example.

A week ago, I returned from Kalambaki, a small town in Greece with 5,000 inhabitants. A sea of tourists, 40 restaurants and cafes, a bunch of small shops. The city is one long walking street for 1800 meters, beyond which there is no life. Hotels and a train station are at the south end. There’s only one restaurant in the entire city on Google Maps. Can you guess where exactly he is?

Why are there no other restaurants on the map? The answer is obvious because they don’t need new customers. They already have a good load and a good profit. It's hard to think. On the other hand, our restaurant is clearly having problems with customers. In order not to leave the market, he begins to look for ways to attract new people. In our case, the boundary is very clear – it is on Google Maps and Apple Maps, and the rest are not. Of course, he will most likely do anything to get into Tripadweiser, negotiate with mini-hotels without their kitchen and so on. You can increase profits by reducing the cost of production of dishes, changing the structure of the check (a more delicious menu), expanding the range (new desserts, etc.). But it all works in mature markets when the customer has a choice. In our city, the most effective strategy is to make a tourist turn to you from a rich stream.

I repeat.To be honest here is not profitable. Advertising won't work. There is only one important factor - the location closer to the flow. This is the situation you see in almost every city with tourists.

The great thing about the economy is that it is self-regulated. The government, which does not intend to poison tourists, has set sanitary standards. The owners of premises raise rent on the stream (the rental price tends to income after taxes of the enterprise). Tourists exchange reviews and sometimes visit our distant restaurant. And each passenger there is 10 people on the stream, because the rent is lower. We don't need a full flow of people. We need sufficient loading – only our own.

In this ecosystem, obviously, everyone has a niche. Restaurants on the stream compete in the volume of screeching (here's a guy in another similar town seriously claiming to have the best ice cream in Europe):

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

Finding the optimal place for the restaurant, forming its strategy, choosing a chef, tasting all dishes, designing the hall, menus and choosing equipment, advertising and PR, working with insolent visitors and returning forgotten things to the native country of the tourist - this is marketing. And the importance of each factor depends only on two things: the life values of the owner and the profitability of the strategy for the current market.

Fair marketing
Possible. Profitable. Very. The limit is to think long-term. Build relationships with people as friends, not customers. Many stories are not from our reality, some are 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 profitable. And that's nice. But I still walk like a minefield for food. And the promises of mobile operators believed only in South Africa. When buying a phone, I want to see not the clock frequency, but to understand whether it will last two days without charging or not. When I take out travel insurance, I am ready to pay more, but I know that I will be refunded without question if I am not given a visa, and they will not have a brain drain for three weeks.

In the east there is a terrible curse – “You have the soul of a merchant.” He's often misunderstood. Trading is an art in many countries. Bargaining is an aesthetic and a kind of insanely cool game. But the soul of a merchant is when a man is willing to deceive a man for profit.

Here's an example.. If the ram is lame, and the trader did not say - it is not a fraud. It's part of the "I didn't look myself" game. Maybe you didn't take it for the skin. The edge is thin. But if you check something with the available means will not work – for example, when the buyer asks if there were infected sheep in the herd, and the trader says that there were no, although there were (but this one, like, does not cough) – this is already a fraud. He who deceives has the soul of a merchant.

So, marketing is the formation of such a product, sale and after-sales relationship, when sales bring you maximum profit. And in our game, under the boundary conditions of a long game, it is advantageous to be open and honest.

Also, do not forget about the people who run the company. Profit is in second place in our priorities. She's important, very important. But first, the pleasure of life. And enjoying life and doing weird things are slightly different things. For us.

I understand that without practice, everything looks too emotional and sublime. Do you want a series of posts about my practice (not just in Mosigra) that can add up to a set of marketing knowledge for your project?

Source: habrahabr.ru/company/mosigra/blog/235953/