MARKETING.
Prof Rory Dunn
Prof Rory James Dunn at Lecturing and Training in my Personal Capacity.
Marketing is aligned to the Roman Proverb: Praemonitus praemunitus (forewarned is forearmed). Marketing assumptions must be validated by analysing critical assumptions and to test them in the field, focus groups and so on. Another construct that can be used to great effect is Shadow Testing. This basically means the process of actually selling an offering before it exists. Remember that you must be up front with your potential customers. Shadow Testing allows you to get a critical piece of customer feedback that as a marketer you cannot get in any other way.
When it comes to Shadow Testing use a Minimum Viable Offering (MVO), which is an offer that promises customers the smallest number of benefits that are necessary to actually produce a sale. A MVO is a Prototype that has in fact been developed to the point that someone will actually purchase the product. Since Feedback (and feedback loops) from prospective customers and paid-in-full orders are very different things. This is when you collect data from from customers, and this tests the idea's critical assumptions, and this of course reduces the risk of making a business-ending investment decision.
Once your MVO is actually selling and you have proven that your critical assumptions are valid, then start making small changes that improve your product offering if you want to remain competitive and thus attract more customers. Incremental Augmentation uses the iteration cycle to add more benefits to an existing offer. The faster you move through the iteration cycle, the better your offering will become. This is Iteration Velocity. So make additions to the core offer and continue doing what works, and of course stop doing what doesn't. Remember that your customers available attention is limited. AIDA - attention, interest, desire and action. To compensate for trying to keep up with everything in the world would require an enormous amount of attention, and in order to compensate, you Filter. So "ration" your attention, and allocate more to those things that you care about and less to things the you don't. High-quality attention must be earned - selective attention and so on.
One of the primary functions of the human brain is perceptual filtering. Receptivity is a measure of how open a customer is to your message. If the want your message to be heard, the medium used is critical. If, for example, your message suggests that it was created just for them, then you are far more likely to get a prospect's attention. Eugene Schwartz posits the prospects experience five levels of awareness during the marketing and sales process:
Certain markets have obvious entry and exit points, and if a new customer is "on the way", this is an example of Point of Market Entry. Framing is used to help present your offer persuasively. Economic values that people consider when evaluating a potential purchase are:
A Gap Analysis is also important, but as stated before, there may be a gap, but is there a market in the gap. Also important, is to distinguish between disruptive and nondisruptive creation.
Prof Rory Dunn.