How to review your digital brand differentiation using 3 complementary frameworks
Differentiation should be considered a key element to your brand strategy and help to provide an opportunity and vision to define a niche within your market sector, helping to gain the attention of your existing customers and extend your proposition to encourage new markets and audiences.
Framework Models of Brand Differentiation
After completing an organisational digital strategy health check, you will have a wider picture of the landscape your organisation is positioned, its strengths and weaknesses, the competitor landscape and the potential opportunity to create a model of differentiation from the competition in order to meet your organisations objectives.
To help understand whether a model of differentiation could exist, it is important to evaluate the quantitative and qualitative research completed. There are 3 models you could consider to apply to your organisation when considering a Brand differentiation strategy:
Three frameworks/models for brand differentiation
Framework 1:…
Digital marketing models to provide useful frameworks for digital audits, planning and strategy
If you are a marketing manager needing to create a digital marketing plan or conduct an audit or review online communications, models provide a helpful flow as to what to include and to ensure nothing is missed.
Previously, in 2013, we created a free guide to support students using models in their assignments or when creating plans - Essential Marketing Models. Based on feedback from studying professionals and their lecturers, we thought it would be useful to have a specific guide to Digital Marketing Models.
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Smart Insights Free Members can also download an editable digital marketing plan template featuring our popular RACE Growth System, a simple structure to…
How data, technology and changing consumer expectations are shaping the marketing mix
The advancement of so many transformative new technologies over the last five to ten years is shaking up the modern marketing world. From the emergence of wearable technology, to chatbots and mobile payment apps, disruption is taking place nearly everywhere we look.
All of these technologies have the potential to give marketers new opportunities to meet and surpass consumer expectations. However, this is only possible if marketers can keep their skill-sets up to date and look at ways to integrate new ways of working into existing processes, for example through an effective digital transformation agenda.
The technological advancement we’re seeing is not linear. Instead, it is occurring rapidly in the form of major leaps, with consumers and pioneering tech companies leading the change:
Many businesses are struggling to keep up and it’s…
Planning and optimising across the whole customer journey is the most effective way to win and retain customers.
Anyone who's worked for an Ecommerce business, or indeed just about any kind of business, will know that customer retention and re-activation is the key to driving consistent growth in profit.
Attracting entirely new customers at the top of the funnel can often become the focus of Ecommerce campaigns because you naturally want to get more and more people into that funnel to convert and thus make you money. But if you have not invested sufficiently in creating an engaging customer lifecycle which converts and re-engages your customers to tempt repeat purchases then attracting new customers will not be the most effective tactic. You should be focusing on improving the customer lifecycle itself.
I'm going to show you why with a nifty little tool I like to call maths.
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How to use the 4Cs to refine your value proposition
The 4Cs (Clarity, Credibility, Consistency, Competitiveness) is most often used in marketing communications and was created by David Jobber and John Fahy in their book ‘Foundations of Marketing’ (2009). Once a business has segmented its marketing and identified the target audience, the next stage is to position the business. To successfully achieve this, the 4Cs is a useful tool to create a positioning statement or to build an online value proposition.
What are the 4Cs?
The 4Cs are designed to help you think about your value proposition.
To understand how this works in practice, I’ve looked at four well-known companies and what’s interesting is that their slogans all meet the rules of Clarity, Credibility and Consistency. The Competitiveness element is less clear. And I am not sure how you would convey competitiveness…
Use Hofacker's 5 states of information processing to understand how your web copy communicates with your intended audience
Professor Charles Hofacker originally created the 5 stages of information processing in his book ‘Internet Marketing’ originally published in 2000. It was intended to help marketers and advertisers consider how well their websites and adverts/promo panels communicated value to website visitors. The book explained how web browsers work (can you imagine reading an article on how Chrome or Firefox work today?) for an audience that was new to the Internet.
What are the 5 states of information processing?
Exposure
Ensuring the web visitor is exposed to the website for long enough to absorb the content or the ad. Within online advertising today, this is measured and media traded based on the concept now known as “Viewability”
Attention
Physical factors such as movement and intensity that attract attention when visitors are on a website
Comprehension and perception
How well visitors understand…
Use the 6Cs of online customer motivation to help you structure your website's conversion funnel
The 6Cs of motivation is a recognised tool used in higher education and looks at ways to improve classroom motivation and student participation. In 2004 Dave Chaffey suggested the 6Cs of customer motivation in a world where the online offer was developing. The aim was that a model of customer motivation would help define the Online Value Proposition.
How should this model be used?
The 6Cs provide clarity when building or refining a website. You can use the template below to assess the benefits a website and online services offers online audiences, as well as those of your competitors.
What are the 6Cs?
Content
‘Right content’ including more detailed product or service information or value-adding content ‘Right context’ of content for the site visit ‘Right media’ including…
Introducing Lauterborn's 4Cs - a variant on the 4Ps
Planning models can be useful ways to structure your thinking when creating marketing plans. They can bring clarity to opaque problems and help you build and effective plan. Because of this we, are outlining 10 of the most effective digital marketing models to help you plan, manage and optimise your marketing. Next up, it's one you may not of heard of, but is related to a model you will have heard of.
What is Lauterborn's 4Cs?
In 1990 Bob Lauterborn wrote an article in Advertising Age saying how the “4Ps were dead” (an early example of clickbait?) and “today’s marketer needed to address the real issues”. He didn’t address the 7Ps which include the service elements of the Marketing Mix model. Instead he suggested a 4C model which gives a more customer-centric take on the traditional marketing mix mapping to the 4Ps of the…
A new whitepaper proposes the Customer Mix as a replacement for the 7 P's marketing mix
Global eCommerce and Multichannel consultancy, Practicology have released a new paper for 2016 putting forward their case that the classic 7 P’s marketing mix needs a fundamental overhaul and in its place, the Customer Mix, or the 6 W’s, should be welcomed which is a more fit for a modern marketing, customer-centric framework. You can download the paper here (no registration required). Let us know your views. Do you think the time is ripe for change, or does the 7Ps still have it's place.
Source: Practicology
The traditional marketing mix framework was created in the 1960’s, a bygone era when organisations held the power based on the size of the marketing spend and how they controlled the limited range of…
Introducing the 10 C's of Marketing for the modern economy
Marketing models, whether traditional or digital, are useful frameworks to focus planning and strong mechanisms to enable organisations to develop robust marketing plans that stand the test of time. Some are particularly relevant for the new age of Digital Marketing, and few more so than the 10 C's of modern marketing. Designed specifically for digital marketing by Chartered Institute of Marketing examiner Richard Gay and featured in Online marketing: a customer-led approach, it was originally published in 2007.
What is the 10 C's model?
The 10Cs considers each element of an online marketing framework. This could be internal and used to review an organisation’s website and related marketing communications and how they are managed, or it could be used as an external tool to audit competitors activities. The customer is placed in the centre and each element is reviewed to see how…
