Question

How would one critically evaluate an organizations marketing strategies from the viewpoint of its consumers, as well as your own attitudes and behaviors as consumers?

Answer 1

It is imperative for any organization to critically evaluate its marketing strategies, especially from the viewpoint of its consumers. It is important to understand that the bottomline is what matters, and the bottomline comes in from the consumers for any organization.

The key points to consider while critically evaluating an organization's marketing strategy would be as follows:

• Customer Centricity: How customer centric is the organization's marketing strategy? Does it consider the end consumer at its center? Is the marketing strategy centered around the end consumer? These are some of the important aspects that need to be considered.
• Digital Impact: Is the marketing strategy sufficiently centered around digital transformation? Are there enough digital programs implemented to capture channel data across various points in the channel? This is important as it is essential to capture demand signals at various points. Capturing end consumer orders is easy, but capturing demand signals is difficult
• Behavioural Analysis: Are we using statistical tools to analyze the behaviour of consumers, and to try and possibly predict what our consumers might want to purchase 2 months down the line? 3 months down the line? With a plethora of tools available, it is imperative for one to know the behaviour of consumers, and this is tightly interlined with the second point on digital transformation.
• Brand Impact: The marketing strategy should have certain power brands which drive the organization. To add to the same, there should be a key message for each brand that the organization sells in the market. There should be a message behind each and every brand in the market.
• Feedback Incorporation: Any marketing strategy is incomplete unless we consider the feedback of the end consumer in the entire marketing strategy. Do we have enough feedback mechanisms to capture the feedback of our consumers? Are we using this to improve our products? How are we handling negative feedback? Are we using this to our advantage to improve our products?

These would be some of the key drivers to carry out a critical analysis of the organization's marketing strategy, and see how it ties back to greater customer acquisition and customer retention, which should eventually translate into better topline and bottlomline growth organically for the organization.