Product
Product refers to the goods and services that are offered to the clients. In the case of Realeyes, product refers to data collection, analysis of data and delivery of results to clients in the form of reports or presentations. Kotler (2005) suggested that product should be viewed at 3 levels:
Figure 36 - Marketing Mix: Product (Kotler, 2005)
Level 1: Core Product
This refers to the core benefits of using eye-tracking studies.
Benefits for clients
The most important benefits of employing eye-tracking in usability are increase in the number of hits/clicks to websites, boost to online sales, and improved user experience. In market research, eye-tracking can be used to increase the visibility of products in supermarkets, communicate client message to consumers in a more clear way through pre eye-tracked advertisements. It is also very useful in benchmarking products and services against the competitors. Apart from this, eye-tracking is seen as very sexy research tool. It helps to quantify the end consumer’s vision.
It offers a lot of advantages even for the intermediaries. They can use eye-tracking demonstrations to impress clients and create awareness about the benefits and value added to research. It not only makes the overall research look hotter but also completes their usability/research toolkit.
Level 2: Packaging of Product
While the core benefits are applicable to most eye-tracking service providers, it is in level2 where firms distinguish/differentiate themselves from their competitors based on how they package the product.
In Realeyes’ case, it is one of the handful of companies that is in a position to conduct global eye-tracking studies because of its presence in United Kingdom, Europe, US and possibly very soon in Australia. This gives Realeyes an advantage for conducting eye-tracking studies for global brands like Sony, Coco Cola, etc. It can also be used effectively by companies that are looking to launch their products or services in new markets.
Realeyes has proven expertise in conducting eye-tracking studies for usability of websites and market research of products. When it comes to collecting data, it is probably the only company that is in a position to collect data from around 40-50 samples and deliver results within a week. Also, the output reports are highly qualitative in nature making them easy to understand and interpret.
The icing on the cake is that Realeyes can do all of the above mentioned goodies at a very attractive price.
Level 3: Augmented Product
At this level, it is all about offering additional benefits to clients around after sales, warranties and the rest to ensure customer satisfaction. Realeyes can look to offer personalised presentations to clients who are using eye-tracking for the first time and also their key customers. It can post online video tutorials on its websites, explaining to customers the nature of their output reports and how to interpret their results. Making successful eye-tracking case studies available for prospective customers can be effective in highlighting benefits and raising awareness amongst clients. Realeyes can also look to assure the delivery of results within a week to customers who are in urgent need of an eye-tracking study.
Promotion program
The promotion in marketing mix is a consolidated application process. It consists of five elements as listed in Figure x. According to Brassington and Pettitt (2003), “Advertising represents non-personal, mass communication; personal selling is at the other extreme, covering face to face, personally tailored messages. Sales promotion involves tactical, short term incentives that encourage a target audience to behave in a certain way. Public relation is about creating and maintaining good quality relationship with many interested groups (for example the media, shareholders and trade unions.) Finally, direct marketing involves creating one-to-one relationship with individual customers, often in mass markets, and might involve mailings, telephone-selling or electronic media.” (Brassington & Pettitt, 2003: Pg 569) While some might have slightly different classification but which won’t harm the competence of concept.
Figure 37 the elements of the promotion mix (Brassington & Pettitt, 2003)
The most essential, and basic mission of promotion is to get the message to target receiver who might not just be customer, but also be the public, the media, or internally speaking, your employees. A promotion, in other words, is a process of communication. (Brassington & Pettitt, 2003: Pg 572) During the process of promotion, what marketer might need to pay attention is the distorted message or the objections in between sender and receiver. “Misunderstanding” is very common in our daily life between you and your friends or family, however, in business communication, usually the communication process is longer and more complicated because time, financial and spatial limitation therefore it is more likely to be distorted or diminishing the strength. A simple communication model is explaining the process between sender and receiver as below.
Figure 38 A simple communication model (Brassington & Pettitt, 2003)
NOISE
For SME’s like Realeyes, the promotion planning flow is similar to every other company while the tactics have to change to fit its capability and its environment. A simple but clear marketing communication flow proposed by Michael L. Rothschild (1987) suggests communication should start from analysing the target market, investigating the environment, and review the weakness and strength of your product properties. After identify advantages and disadvantages, a systematic planning process will start from mapping marketing objective, forming strategies, assessing the viability of strategy (including budgeting) and then goes to implementation and evaluation.
Figure 39 the communication planning flow
Figure 40 the different promotion mix weighting for different target customer groups (Brassington & Pettitt, 2003)
Promotion strategy during Project-Life-Cycle (Brassington & Pettitt, 2003: Pg 585)
Introduction: At the initial stage of product life cycle, it’s more likely to spend more on marketing mix in order to catch customer’s eyes. “Advertising will ensure that the product name and benefits become known and spread quickly among the target market, and sales promotion (in consumer goods market) will focus on samples and coupons” (:584)to entice customer to try.
Growth: “There might be less emphasis on awareness generation an information giving, and more on long-term image and loyalty building as customer start to make repeat purchase.”(Brassington & Pettitt, 2003: Pg 584) As competitor launch similar product/service, it’s important to make sure customer can distinguish the difference (also can refer to Keller’s CBBE model) and stick to your product.
Maturity: “The maturity stage is likely to be defensive or holding operation” (Brassington & Pettitt, 2003: Pg 585) Most people who are willing to try have already done so, therefore the role of communication is reminding (about the brand image and values) and reassurances (about having chosen the “right” product) Even in B2B world, the promotion strategy might focus on strengthening customer relationship by offering customized service and adding more new features/ products into your portfolio.
Decline: Sales declines apparently at this stage when product is obsolete or less competitive. Promotion’s cost benefit will be as attractive as other stage while a certain level of reminder and promotion can slow down the speed that customer walks away. Marketing promotion cannot rescue a phase out product unless customer “thinks” of it as a new product with new meaning. Therefore “re-position” product itself and accordingly design a whole new marketing mix, or plan for exit strategy might be the most important options to promotion.
Figure 41 Project Life-Cycle illustrated for Realeyes’ promotion strategy
Growth
Maturity
Decline
Introduction
Promotion strategy for Realeyes
Budgeting
Judgemental budgeting setting, like arbitrage budgeting and affordable method, percentage of past sales method and percentage of future sales budgeting, are more like “thumb of rule” kind of budgeting. However, as in emergent stage, especially when product life cycle is still in between introduction and growth, it might be difficult to accurately estimate the promotion expenditure based on “previous” experience. Realeyes could use “Data-based budget setting” which plan the budget based on competitor’s expenditure (exceed competitor’s budget in order to take a better chance to compete them) or based on the accumulation of self marketing plan. This method is usually more laborious and sometimes hard to get data. (Brassington & Pettitt, 2003: Pg 594)
Channel promotion tactics
Realeyes may look at the different methods of the promotion mix as listed below, however with a ranked order. Alternatively put, the company could do personal and more private marketing communication first, before starting a public relations or ads campaign, if required.
Promotion Mix
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Sales promotion
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Direct marketing
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Adverts
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Public relationship
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Personal marketing
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Importance
(1=highest)
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5
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4
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3
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2
|
1
|
The main guidelines for promotion tactics are as follows:
Brand awareness improvement
Differentiation (perceptive) strengthening
Using personal marketing as the primary tactic since eye-tracking as a B2B service product requires customer’s personal experience.
Considering financial disadvantage and being risk averse, we’d suggest using public relationship as a cost efficient method.
Avoid price promotion since inconsistent pricing policy might confuse customers and thus reduce trust
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