What is marketing? Supporting the Value Cycle

Marketing is often confused with advertising, but in reality, advertising is only a small part of marketing.  Marketing is about supporting and protecting the value cycle – what’s that? I’ll explain in the context of one of the companies that I work with.  Our teams include:

• A customer team (phones, email support)
• A QC (quality control) team
• A marketing team – we actually call them the value team
• A communications team
• A research and development team

The value cycle

The value cycle is about finding out what jobs people are trying to do, creating something to do the job better than they have already, communicating why what we made was so fab, delivering it to them and then making sure they stay happy.  As a company, we do this not just for website customers but also for other kinds of ‘customers’: employees, researchers etc.

What is value anyway?

Value is love vs. hate … perceived benefits minus perceived detriments.

Notice the word perceive – all that matters is what the consumer perceives, that’s the only reality that counts.  Example: if I give you a bunch of trainer brands like Nike, Puma, Adidas, Lacoste – you will likely perceive that certain brands are better quality and perform better than others.  Actually for the cheaper brands, the quality of materials or the construction of the shoe might be just as good as the ones you favour.

Because every product is there to do a job and achieve something, it is there to offer value through providing certain benefits.  These benefits may be financial, time saving, functional, convenient, psychological, emotional, environmental or improving simplicity.

Our customers have certain jobs to do.  They may have products or services to do those jobs.  Those products or services deliver value – stuff the customer wants or at least, stuff they think they want.   Our job as a company is to identify what problems they have, and create solutions that deal with those.

Example: Male customer, has beard, doesn’t want it…

Current solution: razors

Customer likes: solution is cheap (financial value), does the job (functional value)

Customer hates: shaving rash!

Solution: we could deliver better value to the customer by giving them a solution that didn’t give them shaving rash.  For example, a pill that costs the same as the razors, that would stop their beard growing.  We’d be delivering value on all these counts:  financial, time saving, functional, convenient, environmental and simplicity.  It’s a winner!

So how do you fit into this? Let’s go back to the value cycle.  It looks like this:

Identify – Create – Communicate (get the message to people) – Communicate (get the message right) – Deliver – Support – Monitor/Measure – Sustain

Stage 1 – identify value – find out what customers want/what jobs they’re struggling with

Whose job? Mostly the Marketing department, through market research, customer surveys, customer feedback – customer service staff also play a part.

Stage 2 – create value – create something that does the job better.

Whose job? The Marketing department (planning) then someone else does the creating (for example, in a software company, this might be the programming department – in our company it’s Research & Development).

Stage 3 – communicate value (get the message to the right people)

Whose job? The Communications team – for example, using SEO, adverts, social media etc.  The Marketing team get involved with this bit too, dealing with getting the message to people offline.

Stage 4 – communicate value (get the message right)

Whose job? The Marketing team and Communications team.  We’ll look at the branding, wording, look and feel etc.

Stage 5 – deliver value

Whose job? It depends on the company.  In our company, it’s the Customer Service team who deliver fantastic customer service and support, ensuring the customer’s order is right and they order to meet their needs, and getting the work to the people.  Our database also ‘delivers’!

Stage 6 – support value

Whose job? This is after care – in our company, this is the QC team who make sure a customer is happy once they have their order (the Customer Service Mteam also do a fair bit of this).

Stage 7 – monitor/measure value

Whose job? In our company, it’s the Marketing team and Communications team with a lot of help from our Research & Development department who create tools for tracking and monitoring.  This is about crunching numbers, and seeing how customers feel about their experience.

Stage 8 – sustain value – stay in touch with the customer and keep giving them better value solutions.

Whose job? In our company, it’s the Marketing team, in keeping a close eye on what else is out there and how customer’s needs are changing.  The customer and QC team also help with this.

As you can see, the Marketing team play a heavy role in all stages of the customer’s experience, and are therefore involved right the way through the Company – there’s much more to marketing than marketing communications!  This is reflected if you look at the CIM syllabus which now includes many business and strategy skills.

Why is it really a value ‘cycle’ and not a value ‘line’?

Because when you get to step 8 – sustaining value – you go back to step 1 and start looking at the jobs the customer is doing and how we can add value.

Where the Marketing Department fits into the value cycle

Our main role is to support the value cycle for our customers.  We do this not just for website customers but also for other kinds of ‘customers’: employees, suppliers, etc.

Of course we don’t do all that ourselves!  Every department in the company fits in to this value cycle.  Strictly speaking, the Marketing department would usually be involved with the first bits – finding out what people want, planning it and overseeing its creation.  R & D will usually create it, Comms will communicate it and Customer Service will deliver it.  Then we get involved again with the last bits – evaluating and sustaining (which means looking at the customer’s ongoing needs and making sure we adapt). The bits we’re not involved with, we keep an eye on and offer support. In addition, we work really closely with Communications, and some of our work is technically communications (e.g. writing copy, email campaigns), while some of their work is technically marketing – but that’s okay as in our company, we have an agreed list of RAAs to work to that everyone is happy with.

Day to day, we do a really wide range of tasks – market research, competitor analysis, branding, value plans (looking at a product or service, looking at what’s out there already and what customers want, planning how we’re going to develop and deliver that product/service), pdps (project development plans for new services or products), email campaigns, website content, company initiatives, community projects, developing new services and new sections on the website, promotions, incentives, PR, etc.

Our role can be summarised as:

• Identifying what jobs customers are trying to do
• Identifying current solutions
• Looking for opportunities (where customers are not satisfied with existing solutions)
• Creating value (with help from other departments), i.e. creating stuff customers want
• Ensuring value is delivered by other departments
• Ensuring value is sustained, against competitors and against new jobs customers have to do.