The idea of educating customers is a bit of a conundrum. First of all, businesses survive on an asymmetry of information or of capability – because I as a business know something or can do something you can’t, you as a customer have to pay me for my product or service. Why would a business expend resources to reduce that asymmetry by educating customers at all, even in the most minor way?
Getting from Baffled to Buyer
That question is answered for me every time we participate in a product exhibition, which we are doing over the course of 3 weekends this month. As purveyors of solar lighting, we use these exhibitions to showcase our wire-free solar-powered lighting for homes, gardens, parks and municipalities. Most customers can understand that solar lighting is a convenient and cost-saving solution, but when we remind them that there still remains the necessity of changing the batteries within the lamps every 1 to 3 years (depending on the application), many a time they return a blank stare which reads: “you mean there are batteries in there? I thought this was solar.”
This requires a short lesson in photovoltaics, the process of solar electrification and charging of batteries for use at night, when the sun has set. Most Malaysians reference solar technology with water heaters, which use a different solar thermal process using vacuum tubes that does not require batteries.
Education therefore is a must, because while one can never underestimate the ignorance of people, one should also not underestimate their ability to learn quickly, given proper information! For new product category openers especially, to convert the universe of ignorant prospects to knowledgeable customers, education is therefore required and can be quite a large expense. The usual route is to sponsor workshops or buy advertorial space or ply the convention route, educating customers face-to-face.
Getting from Cheapskate to Snob
There is another case where it serves a company’s interest to invest in educating customers, and that is to educate them on how to be more discerning when it comes to the product category. Premium suppliers tend to do this a lot more. Ever notice that, within the diamond trade, those who extol and are eager to teach the “4 C’s” – cut, clarity, colour, carat – are the premium retailers? Naturally, they would be more eager to highlight to you such factors, which help to differentiate and price their diamonds higher.
Sometimes, though, you don’t have to go overboard on this process of education. Oral-B toothpaste, for example, is so expensive it boggles the mind: a 100ml tube costs over RM10 when other brands, weighing in at twice the volume or more, cost about RM5. A phone call to the company hotline yielded 2 explanations: the Oral-B brand name is “trusted and respected” (uh, okay), and that each tube has a 0.375% content of “stannous fluoride”, which presumably is great for teeth and very expensive.
While the phone call didn’t leave me very convinced, one cannot doubt that the marketing formula works. Unlike the competition, the Oral-B packaging is subdued, with no cartoon elements, no big bold letters, just simple, plain, almost medical themes. Coupled with the high price, it should be sufficient to signal to discerning customers its better quality.
Forums - the new frontier
Nowadays, customer education can happen even with no effort made by the company. Curious customers congregate voluntarily on the Internet in online forums, sharing what they know about your product and searching for clues or tips on using them. A friend of mine who recently bought a German car discovered a rattling noise emanating from the passenger door and decided to go online to a forum in search of answers. The good news is, he discovered a community of others with the same problem; the bad news is, all off them reported it would cost too much to fix and were grousing about it!
For those businesses in a position to do so, creating an online forum alongside their usual standard web site is a simple and cost effective way to manage the education of and communications to their more enthusiastic customers. (It sure beats having them complain elsewhere!) Just be prepared to interact more with potentially unhappy ones.
The ultimate business differentiator
There’s an old saying in business that goes: “The more you tell, the more you sell.” The willingness to educate your customers so that they can make informed decisions is the true mark of a responsible business that is confident its products and services bring value to its customers. In that sense, it does not matter whether the company is at the premium end or not, it should invest in education as long as its wares are competitive in the marketplace.
Appeared in "The Sun", April 16th 2008. PDF version here.
Wednesday 16 April 2008
Tuesday 15 April 2008
Marketing in an Election Campaign
The Malaysian General Elections of 2008 have come and gone and the results are there for all to see. Doubtless they are being analysed with a fine-tooth comb by political analysts, but I thought it would be interesting to review a few of the marketing tools deployed - whether consciously or unconsciously - and the challenges faced by the various parties and candidates in the campaigning that are similar to those faced by marketers.
Positioning
Arguably one of the concepts that created the discipline of marketing as we know it, positioning is about placing your company or your product in the mind of the purchaser, relative to other competitors and competitor features. For BN, the banners and ads were everywhere, and every where, they said the same, consistent message: “Security. Peace. Prosperity.” BN’s TV ad campaign had “testimonial” style monologues about how Malaysia was a harmonious and free society under the BN.
Effective positioning requires an understanding of the market being targeted and your own existing image within that market. Amongst the educated urban voters of Malaysia, the videos came across as over-produced and somewhat strained. The campaign was cynically derided as scaremongering, and urban voters overall seem to have responded negatively. In hindsight, however, there seems little the BN could have done differently, thus elegantly representing a classic marketing dilemma: when you’re number 1, you have less freedom to re-position yourself and you need imagination and daring to do so.
On an individual basis, DAP candidate for PJ North Tony Pua positioned himself through speeches, blogs and interviews as an intellectual heavyweight relative to his BN opponent, that he would be an effective policy maker who would be able to bring some rigour to debates in parliament, and therefore much more than an MP who simply catered to the basic needs of the constituents. This must have struck a chord with the educated, relatively affluent neighbourhood of PJ North, given the results that came out.
Emotional vs. Rational
The BN took out numerous ads in both TV and print media, highlighting development achievements and economic statistics. Attention was drawn to, among others, subsidised health care, GDP growth and the provision of JPA scholarships to non-Bumiputras since 2000. While it certainly may have swayed some voters, it ignored a basic tenet known to experienced marketers: purchasing, like voting, is often an emotional decision. Something about the mood on the ground, especially in the states that went over to the oppposition, was misread and ignored in the churning out of statistics and figures which were un-meaningful to the man on the street. It’s like telling your customers that your new model baseline car has improved its 0-100km/h performance from 12.9 seconds to 11.5 seconds. Big whoop.
Consumer apathy
Marketers are faced with a constant challenge of consumer apathy; for politicians, sometimes even more so. As one lady commented to me during a dinner party last week, “I’ll register to vote when there is someone worth voting for.” Not a sentiment to be sniffed at: this election, there were 10.9 million registered voters, but there were still over 4 million unregistered voters. Couple that with an estimated turnout of 75% and you have about 7 million eligible voters out there who didn’t care to vote for anyone, for one reason or another.
I think the appropriate marketing analogy is about product categories prior to being ignited by product “blockbusters”. For instance, there was bottled water before there was Evian, and there were sexual enhancement drugs before there was Viagra, but look what they did to the category after they launched. In this case, a political candidate “blockbuster” combines vigour, charisma and inspiration, and it takes a politician like Barack Obama to smash both electoral roll register and donation records. In the absence of that blockbuster, the voters/consumers will simply stay at home, literally.
Marketing can only do so much
This might sound like heresy coming from a writer of a marketing column, but all marketers know that sometimes, it doesn’t matter how much is spent in a promotional campaign or how well executed it is if the product does not deliver or is perceived not to deliver on its promise. In fact, the phrase “a triumph of marketing” is often used disparagingly about a product which is successful beyond what it is entitled to be, according to objective measurements of its benefits. In this case, BN certainly needed one such triumph but the campaign that was created could not turn the tide of disaffection that had grown over the last 4 years.
Appeared (?) in The Sun (? date). Sorry, was in South Africa at the time, and didn't catch it.
Positioning
Arguably one of the concepts that created the discipline of marketing as we know it, positioning is about placing your company or your product in the mind of the purchaser, relative to other competitors and competitor features. For BN, the banners and ads were everywhere, and every where, they said the same, consistent message: “Security. Peace. Prosperity.” BN’s TV ad campaign had “testimonial” style monologues about how Malaysia was a harmonious and free society under the BN.
Effective positioning requires an understanding of the market being targeted and your own existing image within that market. Amongst the educated urban voters of Malaysia, the videos came across as over-produced and somewhat strained. The campaign was cynically derided as scaremongering, and urban voters overall seem to have responded negatively. In hindsight, however, there seems little the BN could have done differently, thus elegantly representing a classic marketing dilemma: when you’re number 1, you have less freedom to re-position yourself and you need imagination and daring to do so.
On an individual basis, DAP candidate for PJ North Tony Pua positioned himself through speeches, blogs and interviews as an intellectual heavyweight relative to his BN opponent, that he would be an effective policy maker who would be able to bring some rigour to debates in parliament, and therefore much more than an MP who simply catered to the basic needs of the constituents. This must have struck a chord with the educated, relatively affluent neighbourhood of PJ North, given the results that came out.
Emotional vs. Rational
The BN took out numerous ads in both TV and print media, highlighting development achievements and economic statistics. Attention was drawn to, among others, subsidised health care, GDP growth and the provision of JPA scholarships to non-Bumiputras since 2000. While it certainly may have swayed some voters, it ignored a basic tenet known to experienced marketers: purchasing, like voting, is often an emotional decision. Something about the mood on the ground, especially in the states that went over to the oppposition, was misread and ignored in the churning out of statistics and figures which were un-meaningful to the man on the street. It’s like telling your customers that your new model baseline car has improved its 0-100km/h performance from 12.9 seconds to 11.5 seconds. Big whoop.
Consumer apathy
Marketers are faced with a constant challenge of consumer apathy; for politicians, sometimes even more so. As one lady commented to me during a dinner party last week, “I’ll register to vote when there is someone worth voting for.” Not a sentiment to be sniffed at: this election, there were 10.9 million registered voters, but there were still over 4 million unregistered voters. Couple that with an estimated turnout of 75% and you have about 7 million eligible voters out there who didn’t care to vote for anyone, for one reason or another.
I think the appropriate marketing analogy is about product categories prior to being ignited by product “blockbusters”. For instance, there was bottled water before there was Evian, and there were sexual enhancement drugs before there was Viagra, but look what they did to the category after they launched. In this case, a political candidate “blockbuster” combines vigour, charisma and inspiration, and it takes a politician like Barack Obama to smash both electoral roll register and donation records. In the absence of that blockbuster, the voters/consumers will simply stay at home, literally.
Marketing can only do so much
This might sound like heresy coming from a writer of a marketing column, but all marketers know that sometimes, it doesn’t matter how much is spent in a promotional campaign or how well executed it is if the product does not deliver or is perceived not to deliver on its promise. In fact, the phrase “a triumph of marketing” is often used disparagingly about a product which is successful beyond what it is entitled to be, according to objective measurements of its benefits. In this case, BN certainly needed one such triumph but the campaign that was created could not turn the tide of disaffection that had grown over the last 4 years.
Appeared (?) in The Sun (? date). Sorry, was in South Africa at the time, and didn't catch it.
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