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Market. The Pragmatic Marketing Framework Understanding the Market aspect of the Pragmatic Marketing Framework. Hayley Nash | 2018. Index. Market Problems Win/Loss Distinctive Competencies Competitive Analysis Asset Assessment. Market Problems.
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The Pragmatic Marketing FrameworkUnderstanding the Market aspect of the Pragmatic Marketing Framework Hayley Nash | 2018
Index Market Problems Win/Loss Distinctive Competencies Competitive Analysis Asset Assessment
Market Problems “Discover problems in the market by interviewing customers, recent evaluators and untapped, potential customers. Validate urgent problems to show their pervasiveness in the market.”
What are Market Problems? To deliver products that solve your target customers needs, you must first identify market problems by interviewing customers, recent evaluators and potential customers. You can also ascertain market problems in the same way you might conduct a win/loss, by asking questions about your products using Survey Monkey, and get buy-in by offering the customer a freebie as an incentive to complete questionnaires; a voucher for a free Costa coffee or a prize draw entry to win a holiday are small prices to pay for long term gains.
How are they discovered? Market Problems will often be stated directly as a customer need (example “I want the product to do X”) or implied indirectly, an as yet unidentified ‘need’, for example, a customer might express their disdain of the ‘new website layout’ (market problem: UI is not customer friendly) but then go on to mention how they wish they could remember how to find the product tutorial guides. This indirect need shows another customer need (market problem; product tutorials need to be more easily accessible or visible to the customer). By looking for common issues, which are not often communicated as a customer need, these can go a long way to resolve an issue that effects a vast amount of customers and in turn, become a pervasive market problem / customer need. Listening to the market is the best research that we can do to ensure that we continue to build the right solution for our company, and solve the needs of our customers.
How are they used to drive Product Management through the entire framework and lifecycle? • Market Problems drive Product Managers to concentrate on and solve our target market’s problems throughout the entire lifecycle by removing the guesswork from development, reducing Sales/CRDs concerns related to what our competitors are developing and driving Pre-Sales to gain more leverage with prospective customers with this customer knowledge. • By listening to the customers need, we are able to develop features and products that resonates with our target market and kick starts the entire framework because we have set the benchmark with the market problem.
Win/Loss “Understand why recent evaluators of the product did or did not buy and what steps they took in the buying process”
The What and the How. The easiest way to understand Win/Loss is to first understand what it is and how it is done. The most efficient and effective solution is to implement a thorough win/loss analysis program. This will provide optimum sales alignment and support and deliver invaluable feedback to an organization. It will help a sales team understand exactly why they lost and what needs to be done to improve their performance and the company’s presentation of its products and services. When an opportunity is lost, it is beneficial to analyse the reasons behind it so that we can focus on improving operational effectiveness. The purpose of this is to adjust course and improve on the next opportunity. How is it used to drive product success across all aspects of the framework? The results of a win/loss analysis are priceless to product managers as reflecting on this data can help us gain an understanding of how new customers or prospects perceive our products. We can utilise this across the framework by incorporating it into other aspects of the framework, such as revenue retention, innovation, advocacy, buyer experience and personas.
Where and how is this data used to best effect? • When conducting win/loss it is vital that we focus on the data in the right way and not, for example, try to establish fault. Data analysis is used to best effect when its focused on improving operational effectiveness. • Reflecting on this data, a product manager can gain an understanding of how new customers or prospects perceive their products which is vital to product success further down the line.
Examples of how win/loss is conducted – Questions. Ultimately, win/loss is conducted by asking a series of questions to understand why an opportunity was lost and identify what went wrong. We do this so we can learn and help to improve the process the next time an opportunity arises. Types of questions might include: • What companies did you consider in your selection process? • How did our company compare to the others? • What were the main strengths and weaknesses of our competitors and ourselves? • Can you walk me through your decision making process? • What were the factors that led to our victory or loss? • Who was involved in the decision-making process and what were the main selection criteria? • What could we have done differently to be better? (Ask this whether you won or lost.) • End with an open-ended question that lets the person being interviewed share final thoughts.
Distinctive Competencies “Articulate and leverage the organization’s unique abilities to deliver value to the market.”
The What and the How. • Distinctive competencies are inherent competitive advantages. When we create products that take advantage of our distinctive competencies we are creating products that we can charge more for. • Discovering our companies core competencies lies in knowing its strengths. Paragon, for example, can use their production volume and large number of offices as leverage - large volumes of staff and greater print production centres equate to faster turnaround times and lower cost for the customer. These are just two of our distinctive competencies.
How Distinctive Competencies drive product activities across the framework... • When looking at how we can use distinctive competencies across the framework, pricing is one of the framework activities that can benefit because when pricing products that have competition, you start with your competitors price and then add the value of your positive differentiation and subtract the value of your competitors advantages. Your distinctive competence is one of your positive differentiators, as long as your market values it. • Distinctive competencies drive product activities across the framework, particularly when writing Business plans, conducting Pricing, determining the most effective way to deliver a complete solution, reviewing product profitability and bringing innovation* - by improving your core competencies, you stay even further ahead of the market. • If your distinctive competence is so strong that it essentially makes you a monopoly in your market (i.e. your buyers only consider your products and don’t even consider any competitive products) then that directly impacts your pricing. You have created market conditions and products with no competition. In these type markets, buyers are relatively price insensitive, meaning we can often charge higher prices and barely lose any business. *see next slide
An example of how distinctive competencies can be used across other framework activities. *Take Apple, a company who focus entirely on their distinctive competencies but strive to bring innovation to their market leading products, and they do this by knowing their distinctive competencies and acting on their market problems. A fitting example of this in the form of the iPhone Xr. Apple released the iPhone Xr which unveiled some pretty average tech specs in contrast to competitors newly released, cheaper alternatives. On the surface you would think most people would swerve this product, but no. iPhone Xr sales rocketed, surpassing iPhone Xs, their highest spec phone. How? Simply put, long ago Apple created their own market conditions, with buyers becoming price insensitive. However, they were mindful of the growing number of consumers wanting value for money with an ever growing list of high spec, ground breaking smartphones. So how do Apple appeal to the consumers who want a low priced iPhone, with the same high-quality look and feel that Apple are known for? They change one of the most expensive components (the screen resolution) and create a super upgraded iPhone 8 with almost identical features of the top of the range iPhone Xs. They also changed their pricing, making it more affordable and included a key feature that their consumers expected from them – speed. Their ability to add innovation to a product that is, on the surface, average by comparison, actually brought value to the market – it appealed to the wider population due its price being just right to not feel ‘cheap’ to the consumer, whilst removing the OLED screens in favour of an LED, but keeping the one thing people want – speed, in the form of their own A12 bionic processor, a core-distinctive competency due to it being owned by Apple), making it the fastest smartphone on the planet. In the western hemisphere, where people want everything right here, right now, Apple just changed the direction of smartphones – and that is how you utilise your distinctive competencies to full effect, when you add other framework activities like innovation and pricing to your distinctive competencies, you can’t lose as a Product Manager.
Competitive Analysis “Identify competitive and alternative offerings in the market. Assess their strengths and weaknesses. Develop a strategy for winning against the competition.”
What is Competitive Analysis? To describe how Competitive Analysis is done and what it is can be best described in 3 stages. • Information: the gathering of equivalent facts for each competitor so that you can make a like-for-like comparison. This can be provided in summaries for each competitor that all follow the same format and provide the same information such as annual sales, number of employees, product name, and strategic partners. • Analysis: the information gathered provides comparison, conclusions, and recommendations. For example, analysis will point out that a company is financially unstable and that your sales reps should exploit this vulnerability. • Predictions: review the information and analysis and make educated guesses about a competitor's next moves. Regularly make educated guesses and then review them for accuracy later to hone your skills. - Information gained from competitor analysis can be used across all framework activities for things like generating leads when building marketing plans (Programs), updating pricing models (Business) and when creating Use Scenarios; illustrating market problems in a “story” that puts the problem in context (Planning).
It is important to understand how your product differentiates from similar products and to understand the competitive landscape in which you operate. There are various tools and resources available, here are some that I would use: EXCEL is a trusted tool for data gathering, and great for maintaining, collating, and comparing competitors information. SWOT Analysis is an old age method for studying and comparing competitors. KANO analysis is helpful when looking at the competition from a customer point of view. AHA! has an array of resources including a Blog section that offers great resources for PMs. One such blog highlights 3 simple ways to track our competitors! It can also be used to store competitive analysis, which can be updated and maintained regularly. The internet is the most powerful tool in my opinion. In seconds you can find a competitors product, its technical specifications, pricing, target market, and even its’ clients. You can also read other peoples opinions on specific products via sites like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and get an idea of trends on Pinterest.
Pros and Cons of using Competitive Analysis PROS Clearly define why you want information on a competitor, so that you can determine what to look for. • 1) to sell better against the competition; • 2) to determine how your product features compare to the market; • 3) to identify products and companies to purchase or be purchased by. CONS Competitive analysis can lead to negative assumptions of the market and your company can become too similar to its competitors. • 1) innovation and new ideas can become complacent if you focus too heavily on your competitors. • 2) following trends can lead to failure if thorough analysis hasn’t been given. • 3) if you don’t define what you are looking for, you can end up searching for incorrect or useless information.
Asset Assessment “Inventory your assets (technical, skills, services, patents, other) and determine ways that they can be leveraged.”
What is an Asset Assessment? An Asset Assessment is where we identify assets within the company that we can leverage to make quick wins, or ship with as little cost as possible to the business. Assets can be anything from a product, service or even skill sets, anything that can be utilised against the creation of a future product without having to start from scratch. These assets should be logged in an Asset Registry* An example of this could be where we have a product that has not been touched, from a product management or development standpoint for quite some time, but has the components required to help a product go to market faster or as a standalone product or service itself, if there is a market fit. Asset Assessment can be used effectively across other framework activities such as: Buy, Build, Partner: When determining the most effective way to deliver a complete solution to an identified market problem, where we have gaps in our offering to complete the solution for your market. Innovation: Focus our teams’ creative spirit on solving market problems by leveraging our organization’s distinctive competencies. Buyer Experience: Research and document the buying process our target personas use to select our products. Understand the barriers that buyers encounter during their selection process. Market Problems: Discover problems in the market by interviewing customers, recent evaluators and untapped, potential customers. Validate urgent problems to show their pervasiveness in the market.
The How and What. By using and creating an Asset Registry, like the example shown here, we can record an inventory of our assets. This could be created and maintained in tools like Excel and SharePoint, where IT asset managers can update it and product managers could access it when doing an Asset Assessment. It could also be beneficial to share this registry with several departments to record the assets they use (i.e. products, software, hardware among others) to help us identify duplications of like-for-like assets. The asset registry should be utilised when evaluating new opportunities to see if our company have assets that may allow us to shorten time to market or reduce the project’s overall cost. It is important to note that information contained within this asset registry would be highly confidential and therefore treated confidentially for internal use only, which is why SharePoint would be the ideal tool to store this document.
Examples of Assets and why I think they belong on an Asset Registry list. Software(like Aha, Slack, Trello) are vital to many of us to do our jobs. Software belong on the list so we can identify how many people/departments are using similar tools (and not) provided by Paragons IT. One aspect is to consolidate platforms into one by assessing the volumes and leveraging better deals with the software vendors however, as Product Managers, I would look at opportunities to create new features in our own software for internal staff to use with the intention of replacing these. Apps – how many people in Paragon use Apps on their own smartphones or company phones to manage their workload and manage their diaries? More than a few, I bet! I’d put this on an Asset registry to see if it would be better to create our own app or add features to our current Mobile App, and drive users to Paragons app. Products – all of our products should be listed. Reasons include to see how relevant they are, how long we have had them, how many clients use them, and what their use is.
