Dr.Dan Herman's focus and specialty: The
Next Marketing Hit
From iPad to Zumba, from Crocs to candidate Obama - some new products,
services, entertainment locales, shopping malls or specialty stores, real estate development
projects, personalities and other ‘marketables’ are immediately adopted by their target
population.
Conventional
marketing and branding recommend keeping your brands long-term and innovating with short-term
products. However marketers find out that that consumers often do not 'buy it'. Unless the
competition is very dormant, new products under old brands do not seem all that new
(isn't it so, Microsoft?)
Given
the psychology of today's consumer, it is more effective sales-wise to launch new products under
new brand concepts, strategies and symbolizations (names, logos, etc'.)
You
can also use brand architectures which combine long and short term brands. Does it make
financial sense? You bet it does!
Think Short- Strategically
Normally
a Short Term Brand's success is far greater yet relatively short-lived in comparison to
traditional long-term brands.
The
meaning of "short" varies by category from days or weeks (e.g. exhibitions, concert tours) to
months (e.g. toys, the populating of residential projects), to several years (e.g. electronic
products, vehicle models).
When
properly managed, Short-Term Brands are extremely profitable. A succession of short-term brands
can result over time in a significantly higher average market share and market price than a
long-term brand would have achieved in the same market (looking at your 'average market share'
over time instead of at your assumed-to-be-stable 'market share', is one of the many differences
between Think Short and Think Long marketing)
Dan Herman, PhD, leader of
theTHINK SHORT consulting network, is a marketing strategist, helping companies
and individual business persons to succeed, thrive and profit.
Numerous audiences and companies from many countries have already benefited
immensely from his consulting services, lectures, seminars and workshops.
Now you can too.
I
first observed this phenomenon that I later named "The Fear of Missing Out" in the mid 90's,
while listening to consumers at focus groups and during individual in-depths interviews.
Despite the variety of research topics and business categories being explored, most consumers
expressed - at one time or another –a clearly fearful attitude towards the possibility of
failing to exhaust their opportunities (and complementarily, to miss the expected joy
associated with succeeding in doing so). It struck me as an extremely significant new
development in consumer psychology, and in the following years I have been researching FoMO
as a socio-cultural phenomenon, as a motivation, and as a personality factor. Having studied
its implications for marketers, my belief is that this motivation might be one of the central
factors in the
declineof brand
loyalty.
Creating Meteoric Successes in Marketing - The Marketing Hit
Formula
From
time to time the marketing world is taken aback by huge, quick, unpredictable and seemingly
inexplicable successes. These hits are products or services, entertainment locales or vacation
spots, shopping malls or specialty stores that enjoy puzzling immediate popularity. There are
incognitos that become hot celebrities, there are events, festivals or concerts that capture the
masses, real estate development projects that evoke huge demand, or styles that become trendy.
In nearly all cases, there are also new brands that are immediately adopted by the target
population. For example, Harry Potter orThe Da
Vinci Code,
Apple's iPod and the Blogs, the Hamptons in Long Island New York, Toyota's Scion brand, the
Crest electric toothbrush and many more examples.
The 'Marketing
Scenario' is a practical tool designed to help you make sure that you have a winning marketing
strategy to support your brand. You will do a reality check on those dreams of success to learn
if they make any sense.
The 'Marketing Strategy' is the way we have come up with for achieving our marketing goals and it
should include two mandatory elements:
Which
target consumers whom we can reach, hold a viable potential to buy whatever we intend
to sell?
What is
the offer (the entire marketing mix) we will be presenting to these consumers in order
to appeal to them and thus realize the said potential, given their
alternatives?
Every blue ocean will eventually turn
red.
Create an unfair advantage instead
The vast red and blue oceans of the marketing world tsunamied into our awareness and vocabulary a
few years ago, when two INSEAD professors, W.Chan Kim and Ren?e Mauborgne, claimed that competition
can be rendered irrelevant.
Their book, Blue Ocean Strategy, heralded the news to marketing managers and CEOs all over the
world: after years and years of surviving in red bloody oceans, swarming with murderous
competitors, finally there's a better alternative!
I have encouraging news for you: many of your competitors are afraid of strategy. You might call it
strategophobia. Strategy has two terrifying
characteristics. First, strategy is a choice. "We are going to go for target customers X, and not
the rest," or "The major benefit we will offer consumers is Z and not all sorts of other things."
It seems that when you choose, you have to give something up.
The Best Kept Secret
of Successful Differentiation
A successful differentiation is not imitated by your competitors, even though it brings you
unmistakable success with consumers. It seems impossible? Not quite so. I am about to reveal to you
the unexpectedly simple and wonderful secret of successful differentiation: you must think beyond
the core benefits of your product category. Think: Off-Core
Differentiation.
If you are a seasoned
marketer, this book is different from another you have read. Herman's fresh thinking about
competitive advantage, marketing, customer segmentation, differentiation and branding will
challenge your thinking. It is worth every penny of its cover
price.
