How to Align Product Design with Marketing 4 Ps
Product Development Should Focus on a Bundle of Customer Benefits
Jan 11, 2009
Just in case you are not aware of the 4 Ps of marketing, here is a short explanation. Marketing experts have identified certain factors that lead to marketing success, and have grouped these under four major categories - Product, Price, Place (distribution) and Promotion. (Additional Ps have been added to accommodate factors not adequately covered by the above 4 Ps.)
In this article, the focus is on the first of the Ps, product. Without a product, you can't do any marketing.
What is a Product?
From a technical viewpoint, a product is a package of features. If it is a physical product, it might be sturdy, glossy, brightly colored, aesthetically pleasing and so on. If it is a service, it includes various activities performed by the service provider.
From a customer's viewpoint, however, a product simply satisfies certain needs. It might provide specific benefits such as quick transportation, hunger satisfaction, entertainment to structure your time or even social status. A product can also relieve some pain, as in the case of hospital services or painkiller medicine.
It is when a business loses sight of the latter viewpoint that its product fails to achieve sustained success. In technician dominated businesses, this happens all too often. On the other hand, if you can identify the finer nuances of customer needs and cater to these, you can succeed even in a highly competitive market (provided you attend to the price, place and promotional aspects too).
Marketing-oriented Product Development
Product development starts with research into customer needs and preferences. Do an in-depth study and identify the real customer needs that the proposed product fulfills. For example, you don't eat in a swanky restaurant just to satisfy your hunger need. You have to identify the particular group of customers who frequent the restaurant and their specific goals.
The above example also points to the need to identify the particular customer group you are targeting. Customers do not constitute a homogeneous group. Instead, there are distinct segments with different needs and preferences. For example, a small car caters to cost conscious car buyers while a stretch limo might target business customers.
Once you have identified your customer and researched that customer's preferences, you can develop a product that delivers against those preferences. By product, we mean a total package that consists of the actual product and all the ancillaries that go with it. For example, if the customer is particularly concerned with support or availability of operating supplies, you have to arrange for these along with the product.
This does not mean that you have to deliver the whole package yourself. You can, for example, arrange for a specialist third party to provide support to your clients. That way, you might be able to lower the price of your main product.
Unless you have a clear idea about your customer and that person's specific requirements, you might build in unnecessary (and costly) features into the product. You might also fail to provide highly desired features. While unused features add to the cost, omitted ones affect marketability.
Start with the idea that your product or service is just a bundle of benefits to a particular customer group. Do an in-depth study to identify the specific benefits the group is seeking and develop an offer that bundles these.
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