#specilisation

Everything together or nothing…

As a business owner, identifying the appropriate marketing strategies is committed to their success or failure. 

Known the suitable business strategies and researched about the competitors’ status, business, scope and strategies are also recommended. There are some common questions are underpinned: 

- Who set your price?

- Who determine your market share? 

- Who determine your profit level? 

- Who determine how far you go? 

- Who determine your future? 

All of those dimensions are close related to your competitors. Your competition in the market place somehow determines everything as your level of sales, the prices you charge and how much money you make. Therefore, it is very dangerous to ignore your rivals, how big they are and what are their strategies implementation. No strategies actually is well made in the business without clearly and carefully thinking about your competition as who are they? what do they do? why do people buy from them? how can I get customers to buy from me instead of rivals? How do they react if I get the customers?. That is all you need to define to deploy your competitors capacity and performance levels.   

An effective marketing strategies should not be independent with the competitors investigation and understanding. 

Thus, in complement with the competition study, here is four principles of marketing strategies 

1- Specialisation: products and services 

2- Differentiation: USP, competitive advantages

3- Segmentation: grouped customers 

4- Concentration: efforts & capacity put on targeted segments 

1- Specialisation: products, services, customer, market, or area of technology which you will focus. So, specialisation can be a product, service or a particular customer who you do want to serve or it also can be a particular market area that you want to work in. 

eg: McDonald who customers want to eat quickly and their expected efficiency in values, prices and pleasant. Thus, Mc Donald tends to offer all of their products to those busy customers who want to eat quickly and efficiently in other word those are McDonald targeted segment. 

2- Differentiation: competitive advantages and how your business can be different from your competitors? informing the customer why they should buy from you rather than the competitors? How, why , where, when are you different?

If you can identify and create your competitive advantage which cannot be modified by other competitors, the customers will be more attracted to your products or services offering. As a result, you can make more sales, more money in the year and also have longer customer lifecycle which you offer clear competitive advantage conveyed to your customers. 

Moreover, differentiation is also defined by your area of excellence and superiority which are the things you do better than anybody else. This is to answer the question that why your products is better? which could be quality service, professional staffs....how ever these are too general which also be claimed by any other competitors. In this term, you should be very clear about your ability, capacity and affordability to create the superiority which are aware and accepted by customers. For example, decades ago, Steven Jobs who looked at blackberry phones and brainstorm of why we do not create a phone with only one button. In that time, many people say it is impossible that any phone would be activated with one button. However, then it will be a true beside the story of can’t be done people. Moreover, after that, Apple generates world of Apps for their phone which instigate and evolve the customers habits and reactions toward the smart phone era. Until now, Apple still is on top of the smart phone and mobile industry which offer world of amazing apps to customers which their competitors find more barriers to entry and compete. 

USP is your Unique Selling Preposition which is the one thing that no competitors or any other manufactures in your industry can provide all over the world. This is unique and specific and cannot be modified such as each person is unique because there is only one of you in the entire world with your appearance personality and so on. Therefore, any business wants to gain their competition advantage, there is a must to create and obtain the USP which will be advertised, promoted, conveyed and informed to the target customers.  

eg: with the innovation of an Ipad which is not simply a big iphone but it has been considered as a small computer with around $500. This is not a small amount of money for a device if people does not like it. However, with the Ipad, it seems to be you can do everything on this portable tablet such as reading books, writing documents, prepare a presentation slide, answer the email, and so on which in this time, not many device can bring lot of value like that to customer which should be the USP and until not Apples still save, retain and upgrade its USP with the very capable and smart IOS operating system on their smart devices. Especially, with the supply of Ipad devices and ebooks components, the book industry in US recently is strongly compromised to their sales and revenues dropping. 

What happened to your USP creation if you provide the same products and services profiles to customers in comparison with the whole industry such as a real estate agent. In this case, you will have very same possessions, houses, buildings in each locations around 100 miles area with your competitors. So your USP should focus on your personality (yourself) which is preparation, functionality, warm, phone call, management, follow-up, notes, customers services, contact, ....which bounds with superior quality to build the close relationship between home buyers and home sellers in the industry so customers will not shift to any other real estate agency because you are good at what you do and high level of customer care. You do not to provide them discount but the good care, customers will eagerly come back to you. 

A great question in differentiation is that: “where are you or could you be the best?” Any people or any business could be in the best in one field or something. The solution is to finger out which is your best to maintain and improve it over time. For example, Lady Gaga, she is amazing singer with the very unique dress style, appearance, strong voices and mysterious music performance which classifying and differing herself to any other singer in the world. When she was 25 years old, she was on the top of 10 young singer with the highest income (60m dollar) and awards. 

3- Segmentation: who are the specific customers in the market? who values my area of differentiation? who will pay more for my area of specialisation than any body else? 

Thus, segmentation is segmenting and identifying those customers who most likely to buy from you. Who are those customers who most appropriate your area of superiority? What are their demographics? What are their psychographics? How would you describe your perfect customers? 

- Demographics: age, gender, education, income, position, occupation, location, family status. Thus, if you change your demographics, you may also change the entire target customers and segments to search for the better appropriate demographic targeted groups.  

eg: IBM’s first target customer is the president of the company who needs to make the strategic decision and required to put everything or documents on their computers rather than using duplicated papers. Moreover, they also need to make presentation to the senior executive of the company for the better project outcomes, so computers will  be more and more familiar to them as PC, desktops then laptops and so on. After that, IBM recognised that the decision marketing is shifting to the purchasing managers of the large company, so the whole marketing scope of IBM changes to the purchasing managers. IBM researched about how purchasing manager thoughts, decisions, and behaviours, communicate, income, demographic, .... which will be targeted. As a result, IBM in the past be the biggest percent of sale company in the computer industry in the world because they know their customers. However, up to now, IBM market share has dropped quickly due to high levels of competitors and other influence factors.    

- Psychographics: needs, wants, motivations, goals, ambitions, hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, doubts, worries, problem to be solved? (PTBS). Eg: What they want to be in the future and how your products help them to get there and so on? How can you solve the customer problems when they use your products or services? such as: pain relief stickers after exercises 

All of your advertising, promotions and business activities should be around customers scope, need and wants. 

For example, a restaurant put the very simple bill board as Hungry! turn right here! This is very simple but directly punch to the customers need and problems solving if they feel hungry, they will have very positive response. This is direct and straight forward problem solving case as “Want foods, turn now!”. 

4- Concentration: focusing on the target segment which do you very well to serve them which you will focus all of your energy on them. 

This is where you focus your time, money and resources toward your targeted segment: 

- What are the best possible ways to contact your ideal customers? 

- What are the best possible media to reach them? 

- What are the most powerful appeals? 

I hope I am using this blog right

While working away and filing and processing the weeks ideas on scraps of paper I game across two doodles exercise things inspired by surrealist practice. One was rather good if racy and the other kinda sucked in my honest appreasal. So I asked my self why this was so and then I found my self writing out a nonsense page about "charge"

And so a translated from dyslixicaness to english.

Upon inspection of my own work and the work of others I have noticed that as guiding principle one thing improves the work in countless ways and that is the emotional "charge". now this does not mean the image is an emotive one like a kathe kolwitze drawing but that it was produced with the artist being emotionally charged. And when the emotional charge of the artist and the painting are in harmony and neat painting often comes out. Or at least a better one than if produced with out emotion or when the artist is taken away from the work by unsuitable emotional charge.

So for clarification. I draw well when I want to make someone smile like a cute girl with nice eyes asks for something silly or cute.

Or when I feeling mischeavouse and I draw something shocking.

When something sickens me lampooning it works well..

Or when somehow a gentleness overtake me and I meticulously draw a beautiful feather.

It is an acting principle and and animation one that emotion leads action.