There is a lot of talk nowadays about the power of hidden marketing – or marketing you cannot grasp at the first glance. Remember the old TV ads back in the 70s or the 80s where kitchen products were always presented by a woman mid-through the feminist movement, just coming off work and with little time on her hands needed the best product on the market to help her be more effective? The important part about this is that those ads were incredibly artificial – not many individuals (women in this case) could feel as they were anywhere close to that situation. In that case the product sold an illusion – a what-one-might-be sort of situation rather than a real solution.

What has changed? The attitude toward products and marketing. Nowadays, most products are presented as problem solvers and further on as trend setters. If a product can be both, that’s simply amazing.  However the point of marketing is to build a product that can easily be integrated into everyday life, and if this managed to make something special out of it, even better.

• Understand The Apple iPad

How is this all related to the iPad? The product managed to be a problem-solver and a trendsetter altogether.  Although it didn’t quite change the course of technology development, it was surely the one product that shifted the direction sooner and adjusted the direction to be more focused on usability and effectiveness. The Apple iPad is also a perfect example of seamless integration – not only of marketing, but of all factors that make a product successful.

While it is true that the iPad benefited from the popularity Apple gained with the iPod and the iPhone, it does not change the fact that although more tablets have been released in the meantime, it kept an incredible share market even after the second issue (the iPad 2) was released and although it was more expensive than some. What made it so invulnerable to competition? Great manufacturing, wonderful user-friendly experience – in other words, marketing built in the product itself.

Marketing is not only advertising, that’s why it’s a broader concept. Marketing means seeing a product in the hands of the user and anticipating his needs in terms of purpose, feeling and general outcome. The iPad was built with a certain purpose – to make a bridge towards the non-PC world. Whereas smartphones are becoming more and more powerful, their biggest limitation so far is their size, therefore taking PDA format, making it larger but also thinner and easier to use, the tablet was born. And it became increasingly popular, because it was built to serve in an effective manner. Certainly, the cult of Apple helped push it into so many homes and offices.

• Understand Your Market

Marketing, as a word comes from the word market, and that’s precisely where marketers nowadays fail – at understanding the concept. Without enough market research and anticipation, further marketing is completely useless.

Marketing isn’t applied at the end.  From the moment market research is done, marketing should be a part of the entire team. And it’s not only for products, it goes great for services as well. A couple of important steps include:

The best way to ruin a product by not understanding the market.

1. Know what the market needs.

2. Anticipate in order to augment those needs. Establish core values of the product or service.

3. Stick with the engineering team and remember to implement the core values along the way (this applies for services too).

4. Ensure a seamless integration of those core values in the manufacturing process (skip this for services).

5. Create a realistic advertising campaign. Focus on the strengths of the product and show it in its problem solving dimension.

6. Bill the customer accordingly. Don’t make your product pricier than necessary. Create a luxury cult around it if it’s the appropriate strategy; however, there’s always a limit.

7. Keep the customer in the loop. Make him feel special.

There’s certainly more to efficient marketing than a booming advertising investment. The iPad became such a market smasher thanks to a carefully crafted marketing campaign that had the end user as its most important research resource – the only way to build a lasting product, is to make it unique in its segment and approach, and to solve a problem with it. Not “yet another” problem solver, but between if not actually the best problem solver there is.

No related posts.