Question

For this discussion, I would like you to outline the elements of the marketing strategy (the marketing mix + the target marketing) for a radically new toothbrush. First, describe your target marketing, price, product, place and promotion elements. Be creative! Second, identify your competitive advantage – i.e. why should someone purchase your toothbrush over the competition? After you have posted your marketing strategy, thoughtfully comment on at least two of your classmates’ strategies. Do the elements fit together? Does the target market seem appropriate? etc.

Answer 1

Targeting the market is simply defining who your primary customer will be. Step One — Identify Why A Customer Would Want To Buy Your Product/Service. The first rather than targeting everyone in their promotional strategy.

Get your message to the people who need and want what you have to offer! This guide takes you through a step-by-step process that helps you identify specific target markets within your industry and provides you with the know-how to create customer profiles to better channel your marketing efforts.

IDENTIFYING YOUR MARKET

1. Here are three steps to follow when identifying your market:
2. Identify Why A Customer Would Want To Buy Your Product/Service
3. Segment Your Overall Market
4. Research Your Market
5. Step One — Identify Why A Customer Would Want To Buy Your Product/Service

While features are valuable and can certainly enhance your product, benefits motivate people to buy.

A marketing strategy that is a little less buzz and hype-driven yet still viral in nature. Let’s look at a simple thing that everyone uses (well, mostly everyone): a toothbrush. Traditional marketing and old money business people will tell you that the better toothbrush will sell more but what does “better” actually mean? It depends what your target customers are. For kids, both big and small (some of us are still kids at heart), cartoon-stickered and music-generating toothbrushes are the epitome of oral hygiene devices.

For the rest of the world, style still matters but effectiveness, practical use, becomes a greater distinction. Think about the last time you purchased a toothbrush and how often you make this decision. What affected your decision? Did you go for the toothbrushes in the front or did you look further back on the shelve? Was it an impulse buy, perhaps triggered by a clever end-cap display or cashier counter arrangement? Did you even notice how hard or soft the bristles are? Was the type of grip and general structure of the toothbrush a big focus for you? What was the final tie breaker (assuming you were initially indecisive)? The chances are that, if you were put in a group of 50 people, your decision-making process would be quite distinct. Once we recognize that not all consumers think the same way is a humbling experience for all business people…

In spite of the many differences in buyer decision-making processes, there are common threads. Some packaging may appeal more to others while other packaging may be effective for a different type of buyer. Marketing is very much about packaging or, better yet, how you frame a product or service, yet there is a lot more to that than the product itself. Production, a thing of the Industrial Age, can be easily sent overseas and thus matched. That being said, if you hang your hat on just having the best toothbrush, you are setting yourself up for failure.

The coolest colors, the best grip, the most effective bristle lay-out, and all these other design issues are nice but they are nothing in themselves. We return to the original determinant of logical buyer decisions: the effectiveness of the product. The caveat to that last statement is that consumer decisions are often all but logical. I say this often because there are many great products out there that don’t survive or barely hold onto their market share. Why is it that there are great products not selling? There are many answers to this but one of them is the fact that people have forgotten how to tell a good story. Seller talk and interrupt marketing have desensitized people to the point at which it is very difficult to get a buyer’s attention. There’s just too much noise for people to want to stop to listen to something that may very well meet their need or establish a need they didn’t even know they had.