It is the hardest of tasks. Your product is the market leader, your customers love it. You have the biggest market share and a premium price. But your competitors are closing the gap, your market share is decreasing, customers are increasingly struggling to justify paying more for your product.
But whenever you make any changes you receive a flood of mail from your most loyal customers telling you not to change what is already great. You already have the best adverts in the sector, in fact, your competitors love what you are doing to support the category, they benefit nearly as much as you do with every ad. that you release.
So how do you improve on the best, open up new ground between you and your competitors and avoid losing all those consumers that don’t want their favourite product to change?
We like products because we like the way that they make us feel. Consumers will tell you that they like the flavour or the texture, but what they really mean – if only they knew it – is that they like the way that the flavour and the texture (and in fact the whole consumption experience) changes the way that they feel. It is not just about how they feel after consumption, it is the sensorial and emotional journey that our product has taken them on from the start all the way to the end.
When we understand this journey; how and why the sensorial journey has delivered the emotional one, how the journey that our product delivers is distinct from that of our competitors, and what is the ideal emotional journey for our consumers. Then we will know how we can improve our product.
Subtle changes to the sensorial journey that enhance the emotional journey, that deliver what our consumers are looking for from our product, but even better. Changes that our consumers love, but confuse our competitors.
Like with so many things in life, when it is done well it looks easy, until others try to copy, then they realise they have no idea how you did it.
At the Marketing Clinic we know how it is done because we have done it for leading brands around the world.
