10 Things I Learned from Joanne: Lesson 3
Alignment
This is the third article in a series I’m calling 10 Things I Learned from Joanne. The other articles are:
In the first lesson, I learned that each level of the marketing and sales model must be measurable. Joanne’s logic is that if you have a level in the model with no measurement, why bother with the level? I agree, wholeheartedly.
In the second lesson, I learned about the difference between a measure and a metric. Read the article to discover Joanne’s genius and the magic between collecting and calculating.
Alignment
In this post, I’ll describe what Joanne calls “Alignment”. On page 4 of our book, we define what we mean. I learned from Joanne that the basic components of marketing are simple. You need a product that solves a problem, a market that wants the problem-solved (and is willing to pay for the problem solving product), and a series of marketing activities that connect the market with the product.
The image that Joanne and I developed that captures the concept of alignment is:
By Tanya White
In this diagram, you can see that Marketing stretches across the entire horizontal line to include the Product and the Marketing. This illustrates the importance of marketing in the goal of bringing the product and the market together.
“Alignment“ is reached when the company has developed a business model where the product, the market, and marketing all support one another in fully complementary relationships. The market wants and needs the product, and marketing supports the purchase of the product (page 4).
In the Alignment model, there are 3 parts:
The Product which is “A tangible good and/or services (often intangible) over which a company has control of the characteristics, features, benefits, and price” (page 161).
The Market which is “The people whom a marketer wishes to influence. For simplicity, the “Market” is people, but it could be companies or some other entity. Typically, a market is made up of people who are potential buyers” (page 160).
and Marketing which is “All the activities done by marketers to attract people from the market and persuade a portion of the people to act on the behavior as defined by the outcomes” (page 160).
A company can either start with the product or the market. If starting with the product, the key question to ask is, “What can I offer that someone needs and will buy it for a reasonable price?”. On the other hand, if you start with the market, then the key question is, “What does the market need, will they pay for it, and can I profitably produce and deliver the product?”
Classify Your Situation as One of Five Situations
In Step 10 – Classify Your Company’s Situation from our book (page 137), we lead the reader through a series of questions to determine the type of situation that fits your company. Classifying your company into one of the 5 situations is important for understanding if you have alignment or not.
The first situation is where the Product is high-valued, the Market is responding well, and Marketing is appropriate. In other words, everything is going well, and the three components are in alignment.
The first response in this situation is to continue optimizing the performance of marketing as demonstrated by the Customer Acquisition Model (page 6). Additional options would be to develop a new product for the current market or to look at targeting new markets using the same product. See Ansoff’s Matrix.
The second situation is where the product has high value, the market is responding well, but sales are low.
This suggests that the component of marketing is the issue and needs to be fixed. As a marketer, you should look at increasing investments in marketing to drive up product awareness.
The third situation is where the product is awesome - it solves a real problem – but the market is not responding well to marketing activities. In this situation, the market and, as a result, marketing are issues.
The best response in this situation is to take a serious look at Step 9 – Look Outside the Model (page 109) and consider extensive market research. The objective is to find a market that needs the product that you are offering. If there is a real problem and your product will solve the problem then the issue is to find a market that has the problem and is willing to pay for your product to solve the issue.
Years ago, Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka wanted a way to listen to music using a portable player. Norio Ohga developed the prototype. The key was changing the sizes of the player and the headphones. Up to this point, most cassette players had speakers which emitted sound for an audience that wanted (or not) to listen. Many devices also had the ability to record. The Sony Walkman, however, was developed to listen to music privately.
In the beginning, sales were slow. People didn’t even realize that they had a problem that needed solving. But in time, the Sony Walkman became one of the most successful brands of all time. By the end of 2010, 220 million were sold, launching a new industry of portable personal audio players. This, of course, led to the iPod by Apple and later the smartphones that have become ubiquitous.
The fourth situation is where the Market is responding to Marketing activities, but the Product is not selling. Let me tell you, this is frustrating. In this case, the company is advertising and people are responding to the ads by visiting a website, engaging on social media, and asking about the product and pricing. But people are not buying.
The solution (page 141) is to accept that the market is the anchor. Then figure out what is the problem with the product, e.g., pricing. The solution could be as simple as lowering the price. However, there could be additional issues such as:
Lack of the correct product features
Unclear benefits of the product
Poor customer service related to the product
Poor reputation of the product (and maybe the company)
Ultimately, this situation should be fixable, but it may take a very hard look at the features of the product and a significant investment in marketing.
You want to avoid being in the fifth situation. In this scenario, nothing is working. The product sucks, the market is not responding and doesn’t care, and marketing is burning up through cash with no tangible results.
If this is your situation, and the alignment of all 3 components is badly out of alignment, then you have a lot of work to do. You might need to start from scratch but hopefully not. Again, the place to start is at Step 9 – Look Outside the Model (page 109). Start with forming a team to look at the situation (page 113). The first task of the investigative team is to select one or more of the 7 sources to gather more information related to the problem (page 116). The sources we have included in our book include:
Internal Statistics and Information About Your Customers
Your Admin, Marketing, and Sales Force
Experts, Government Reports, and Economic Reports
Your Current Customers
Your Lapsed Customers
Social Media and Digital Followers
The Competition
A place you might want to start that is quick and isn’t cost-prohibitive, is with Social Media and Digital Followers. Below is a list of some questions you may want to consider:
In our book, we suggest additional questions related to the Product, the Market, and Marketing to help understand the context and help chart a path for the future (page 128).
In time and with some effort, you should be able to Evaluate (page 134) and Classify Your Company's Situation (page 137).
Conclusion
In conclusion, I learned all about alignment and a new way to look at marketing. Previous to this I had used the 4 P’s (product, place, price, and promotion) and/or the 7 P’s of marketing (product, price, place, promotion, people, process and physical evidence). To be honest, I find the concept of the alignment of the product, the market, and marketing, to be simpler and easier to understand – and use with my clients.
Buy the book. Read Phase 4 – Improve Alignment. Let me know what you think.