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…
Over a half a billion Smart Phones will be sold in Africa between now and 2020
Digital marketers by definition focus on areas where people are connected. The tech revolution started in the US, and quickly spread to Europe and then on to Asia. Now there are more smart phones, internet connections and ecommerce purchases made in Asia than any other region.
Unfortunately, Africa has frequently missed out on the potential of the digital revolution, and because of this it has remained a small market (in relative terms) for digital marketers, and hasn't received an awful lot of attention.
That should be starting to change. As the chart below shows, not only are phone shipments to Africa increasing considerably, to over 200 million units a year (that's the combined population of the UK, France and Germany!) but they are also becoming mostly Smartphones.
Smartphones ownership means internet access, ecommerce potential and social media use. Digital marketers should take…
Lessons to learn from Start-up failure
This week we are releasing our new growth hacking guide and have a bit of a growth hacking and start-up theme across the blog. Although we focus on the marketing side of start-ups pretty exclusively, it interesting to look at why start-ups fail, and see how this fits in with marketing issues.
A study by Quartz looked at 87 bootstrapped (that's Californian for growing without venture capital funding) start-ups which failed, to find out what caused their eventual downfall. Only 2 explicitly blamed poor marketing, which isn't a huge amount, although is above pricing issues, legal challenges or burn out, which are no small matter. If you're running a start-up or work for one it's a great chart to spur thinking and maybe even do a bit of soul-searching to think about where your weaknesses are and how you can avoid the most common traps.
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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…
3 essential requirements for a more strategic marketing planning approach
To compete today, a company needs a unique brand story if it’s going to really have success at capturing and maintaining a clear competitive edge over other organizations in its niche. This brand story has to resonate with your customers and play to their desires, passions and needs. But how can this be created? I believe that the best way to achieve this is by creating and implementing a systematic process of research with the framework of something called strategic planning. In this article I will cover the 3 techniques which can help support a more strategic approach.
1. Make time for Marketing Research and Planning
The most important quality that an organization needs if it wants to make understanding its customers a key part of its long term strategic planning is the development of a deep understanding of those customers real needs.
You will have to get to…
5 problems that block strategic marketing planning and strategic thinking
Michael Porter sums up the focus of strategic planning best for me:
“The essence of strategy is choosing what NOT to do. Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different".
I love this Porter quote - in marketing planning (any planning) we have to make decisions - there is not endless time and resource available to any of us, there is always too much to do.
This lack of time to focus on strategic planning and thinking was shown in our research on Managing Digital Marketing. Many organisations we asked did not have a marketing strategy to align their digital strategy against... So the question is, how do achieve focus? How can we avoid the common problems that limit strategic planning?
Focus!
The central premise of Porter's advice is to develop…
