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There are many elements in a successful growth strategy, including
picking the right markets, understanding customers, creating programs
that focus on the right behaviors, and accurately assessing your
own capabilities. Achieving growth involves not one thing, but many.
It cannot be brought about by a single change. It takes discipline,
integration, and time.
Most companies know and practice some elements of this growth discipline,
but the best do them all-and do them systematically. These companies
bring together, in an ordered fashion, the insights and the infrastructure
needed to identify and capture a steady stream of growth opportunities.
Less successful companies often work just as hard at it but do not
achieve as much. Their problem is usually not a lack of initiative,
but "initiative soup."
From our experience with many clients, we know the value of an
integrated discipline for achieving growth, and we have structured
this disciplined set of steps into an architecture we call the GrowthPath approach.
The Growthpath approach is a proven strategy that has helped
businesses accelerate the rate of growth in their core market by
1.5 to 2 times historical levels.
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Effective marketing strategy is based on understanding customers
and their behaviors, but most companies are not precise enough about
the customer behaviors they want to change through their marketing
efforts. By targeting the specific customer actions that are most
likely to drive growth, marketing organizations can be made more
cost effective, and their different functional areas can align against
a common, actionable goal. The first step to building a deep understanding
of which behaviors to target is to identify what customers experience
in their buying process.
The quantification of these "paths" that customers may
take provides a company with a point of view on where to intervene.
This level of specificity improves a marketer's chances of communicating
and reaching the customer. Analyzing the Buying Process rigorously,
in the context of the GrowthPath approach, prevents a company
from three common pitfalls:
- Lack of a model to map how consumers act
- Not understanding the value of different
customer behaviors
- Marketing programs that are not centered
on activating the right behavior
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Everyone knows that developing an excellent understanding of the
relevant markets and customers is fundamental to good growth strategies.
But what, in practice, does "excellent" really mean? We
define excellent as meaningful-i.e., takes into account real life
customers and their behavior, and actionable-i.e., the company can
recognize and target the customer. Excellent means that the understanding
drives real growth.
When we provide our clients with Action Segmentation services, we built
actionability into our approach. We help clients identify real,
meaningful segments that an organization can actually find, understand,
reach, connect with, and serve. By quantifying the market activity
within those segments, using Market Mapping, our clients can target
specific customers for specific behaviors-and anticipate the resulting
growth from success in meeting those customers' needs.
To build an Action Segmentation framework for our clients, we draw on management
knowledge and intuition-working with existing data, not discarding
it-to hypothesize drivers of customer behavior. Supplemented with
additional market research, we can distill the key factors that
predict desired behavior (e.g., category or brand choice) to help
refine the segmentation. Using statistical analysis combined with
management knowledge, we can segment the market into distinct and
meaningful groups that can be targeted in a sequenced fashion.
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Once you know what the meaningful and actionable segments are,
how do you go about making them act differently? Marketers need
to understand customers well enough to know why they act the way
they do-and when. Said another way, a company needs to understand
customers in more than statistical terms. Statistical averages do
not buy products; only real people do. Marketers need to know these
people in all their individuality, the same way salespeople do.
M2C's Customer Portrait
and Consumer Portrait frameworks provide our clients with a unique approach to learning about customers. These portraits synthesize
the information a company has or needs to have to create an integrated
picture of their customers-a picture of how and why they buy, how
they act, and what motivates them to act as they do. This allows
marketers to transform mere data into the stories customers tell
themselves when they buy and use products. And these stories, in
turn, connect readily to the specific actions a company can take
at specific points of intervention to change the specific customer
behaviors with the highest leverage on growth.
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