Peter Drucker said that the purpose of a business is to create a customer. Thus, the most fundamental determinant of marketing success is meeting the needs and wants of some specific segment of the market. You must start with a definition of the market you are planning to serve. If it is books sold on the Web, the market would be the Internet Book Market. That market can be segmented by demographics such as age and gender since there could be sites for women's books or children's books, by psychographics such as lifestyle if products were designed for homebodies or adventurers or benefits sought such as price, selection and service. The intersection of each segment represents a possible market opportunity for a new product. For example, you could start a book site for men who see themselves as adventurers and value selection and service but care less about price, say Serengetibooks.com. Or you could market to all possible segments of the market, like Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com.

 

Your market coverage strategy defines your target market. If you went after the whole market with one site, that would be an undifferentiated market coverage strategy. If you planned to reach two or more markets with separate sites, say one for adults and a special site for children, that is a differentiated market coverage strategy. A concentrated market coverage strategy would be focus on just one market niche. The market coverage strategy determines your target market. For example, Amazon.com's target market is everyone (since they follow an undifferentiated strategy) while our Serengetibooks.com's target market would be the segment of adventurous men who care about selection and service.

 

Now you can begin to think about an exhaustive list of needs and wants for your target market without fear of coming up with the wrong needs and wants. After all, you know who is in the market.

 

If your product doesn't meet the needs and wants of a specific segment of the market—possibly the whole market—it will fail. Hardly rocket science, you would think this point would be so well understood that product failure rates would be low. But quite the opposite, they are high, estimated to be about 85% for consumer packaged goods! You can avoid failure by meeting consumer needs and wants.

 

But your product also must have meaning in the minds of consumers, something achieved through positioning. Without meaning, your product will probably fail since people will be confused about what it is relative to the competition. Why would someone visit a Web site they didn't understand? They wouldn't.

 

Positioning

 

Positioning starts with figuring out how consumers make buying decisions. Here a buyer behavior analysis can help. This is a challenging task to do, but if you do it right, everything else in positioning will fall into place. The goal is to uncover, through putting yourself in the shoes of your buyers, the evaluative dimensions that they use to choose among brands in the target market. You already have a head start. You know some of the benefits sought (from the segmentation analysis) and most of the needs and wants. All you need to do is to arrange the more important ones in a hierarchy, which you can even draw as a flow chart.

 

The final part of positioning is to substantiate the meaning of the product with product features. The product principle says that every product is a combination of physical and psychological attributes. Perception of "rugged" in an SUV may be substantiated by styling (a physical feature) or just a name. That's why almost all of the great rugged names have already been used!

 

Serengetibooks.com hopefully sounds adventurous. Amazon.com sounds big. Barnes and Noble sounds, well, like a physical bookstore where you could sit down to browse through books with a cup of coffee. There are many other psychological attributes that can lend meaning to your product as well. That is why we sometimes speak of a brand "personality." Who wants a brand with no personality?

 

The core benefit proposition of a brand, then, is a restatement of its meaning in a few words, perhaps just those words that represent the brand's positioning on the evaluative dimensions. Land Rover's Discovery was positioned as a rugged but luxurious SUV. If you can't state a core benefit proposition for your product you have done something wrong. And if you don't know what it is, the consumer will never know. And that means no meaning. And that means failure.