Introduction
I want to ask you a question. Are you satisfied with your marketing efforts? If you aren’t maybe it’s time to try a new way to market your business. In this episode of Marketing Distilled, I will walk you through a framework that I have learned. I think this framework is far superior to others that businesses and marketing professionals use. Perhaps you’ve heard about it. Maybe you haven’t. Well, today on the podcast, I’ll introduce you to the best marketing framework I know of.
This framework is called “Big Picture” and it was developed by two educators and practitioners, Christie Nordhielm, Ph.D., and Marta Dapena-Baron, Ed.D. Dr. Nordhielm founded The Big Picture Partners and began to implement the framework with companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Philips, and Ecolab. She teaches at Georgetown University in DC. Dr. Dapena-Baron is the current managing partner of The Big Picture Partners, LLC where she consults with major businesses and organizations to use The Big Picture Framework to make smarter marketing decisions.
Much of the material I’ll be talking about is from my work as a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati where I study under Prof. Drew Boyd and learned The Big Picture Marketing Framework from him. I’m currently applying The Big Picture to my work in my Capstone Project in my final semester. So what is The Big Picture Framework?
[powerpress]
I’ll break down this framework in this episode of Marketing Distilled, but first a word from our sponsor, Evernote.
Break 1: Evernote
The Big Picture Marketing Framework
Marketing is hard to begin with and what makes marketing harder is not having the right tools or frameworks to adequately solve business problems and make intelligent decisions.
The Big Picture Framework includes modules that Include:
- Business Objective
- Marketing Objective
- Source of Volume
- STP (Segment, Targeting, and Positioning)
- Execute (Product, Price, Place, Promotion)
- Evaluation
In this episode, I’ll discuss the first two parts of the framework: The Business Objective, and the Marketing Objective.
The founders of The Big Picture Partners have written a textbook for use in classes and academic work, called Marketing Management: The Big Picture. Dr. Dapena-Baron has written an updated book geared more towards business leaders and marketing executives called Big Picture Strategy: The Six Choices That Will Transform Your Business
Part 1: Business Objective
What most people do is start with customer needs and wants. Ironically, this is the wrong place to start in marketing. The better place to start is with the Business Objective. It centers around answering questions that are simplistic sounding but really take some time to answer. These questions are:
Who are we?
This question is really meant to get at the heart of what we’ll call the Fundamental Entity. That is, are we a company, a brand, or a product or product line? It’s vital that we start with this question first. But to find out about who we are, or what the FE is, we have to ask the questions:
- How do our customers think about us?
- How does our company organize our brands? (Distinct, Hybrid, or Umbrella)
- How does our competition see us?
What are we good at?
This is a really simple question but the thing I love about this framework is that is immediately forces us to play to our strengths. Imagine being in charge of marketing for a company that was great at working on cars and trucks to repair them but then they decided that they wanted to start making donuts and pies because they saw the opportunity to make money because their customers at the shop liked eating donuts while waiting on their oil changes. This is, of course, a ridiculous hypothetical but it’s to prove a point. Businesses need to pay attention to what they do best and play to their strengths. Things that are core competencies might be be a marketing department that can build a powerful and valuable brand. This department can do this for many brands. This garage example, might have a proprietary approach to car repair, either using technology or innovation to make car repairs faster or train their mechanics in advanced repair techniques.
Where are we Going?
This is simply the goal that we want to attain. What do we want to achieve? The goal is designed to make sure that we know, as Drew Boyd puts it, “Our north star”. It serves as a rallying point as well as something that we can screen our decisions through. Whenever we’re in doubt or not sure, we always look to our goal and north star to make sure we’re doing things that will get us to that goal.
In The Big Picture Framework, the authors specify that goals should be:
- Measurable
- Time-Dependent
- Single-minded
- Realistic
- Integrated
It sounds a lot like the SMART framework, which is Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-bound. I like how the framework’s components include Integrated, and that means that the goal should lead up to higher order goals or be helped by lower order goals from other departments or staff. Michael Hyatt, of FullFocus Co, has extended the goal framework to be SMARTER, so perhaps I could coin my own framework for goal setting to be S.M.A.R.T.I.E where it’s specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, time-bound, integrated, and exciting? I think I just did!
What business are we in?
This question is geared towards narrowing down your company’s focus on what you will do or are doing. Apple can answer this simply by saying that Apple is in the lifestyle electronics business, we make computers, accessories, tablets, phones, and electronic devices for people to have a more meaningful life.
We’ll be back with part two of the Big Picture Framework after a word from our sponsor, WP Engine.
Break 2: WP Engine
If you have enjoyed the Marketing Distilled podcast, I’d like to ask that you rate and review the podcast through whatever podcast tool you use, especially on iTunes. It means a lot to me that you’d do so, and it would help others find my podcast episode so that we can help more marketers and business owners with their work.
And also if you would, email me at contact@jonathangaby.com with your suggestions for future shows, your questions, and comments if you like. I’ve used whole episodes of Marketing Distilled to help businesses with their questions. I’d love to help you too! Just record a voice memo and email it to me or type it in the email and send it to me.
Now, let’s get back to the show!
Part 2: Marketing Objective
If you’re still with me after Part 1, congratulations! We’ll get going with more marketing!
First, marketing is all about one thing, acquiring or retaining customers. The next question naturally should be, how do we define our customers? This is important because we want to not only know who our customers are, but we also want to know who our customers aren’t. But there’s another benefit to defining who our customers are. We do this so that you know how many customers there potentially are in your market.
To now think about marketing we should understand two very important concepts; customer loyalty and customer lifetime value.
There’s a simple way to understand customer loyalty and that is this: “It always costs more to get a new customer than it does to keep a customer”.
Customer Lifetime Value is defined as “the total value of a customer throughout the life of the relationship with the business.”
Then, we have to decide what our objective is. This is simply to ask the question, do we want to Acquire new Customers or Retain existing ones? Of course, for any business, it’s going to be an acquisition of new customers, but we should always have retention in mind. The best companies have some sort of strategy that goes like this: I want to have customers buy from me more often, they should want to pay the full amount for the product, and they will tell their friends and our business about the business.
At this point, you’ll want to assess how loyal and what kind of loyalty your customers have toward your brand. The Big Picture Framework places a customer in three categories of loyalty:
- Heart – most loyal. These are intensely loyal and view their purchase of your product as part of their identity. They’re tied to your brand emotionally.
- Head – next loyal. These are highly engaged but not as much. These people are more likely to use your product based on performance and logical arguments.
- Hand – least loyal. These people are the least loyal, or they don’t really consider other alternatives. They use the product and they likely will continue to use the product because it just works.
Now that we have understood who our customer is, how many there are, and then the customer lifetime value, and loyalty. we now have to think about the marketing activities we should do to acquire and retain those customers.
Acquisition Activities:
The kind of acquisition activities we do depend on a couple of things. One, do we need to bring new users to the category of the business, or do we want to entice customers who are in the category already to switch to our product?
A lot of marketers will offer free trials of products or high-value coupons. These things should only be done if we know that offering customers a free sample or discount will lead to a life of business with the customer. If we don’t know that for sure, we ought to consider using informational advertising to help the customer “support their new habit” in purchasing our product, and to continue to buy our product based on the experience they receive!
Retention Activities:
Retention activities and money spent on keeping customers have a couple of effects. First, we know that as a business we won’t need to make that initial investment of money to acquire them. They’ve already been acquired. We can spend less money to keep them by reinforcing the features and benefits the product gives them. Second, we are actually defending ourselves from the competition, because from a customer’s perspective, why would they want to switch from our product to another one? They already use a product that works for them (whether they or heart, head, or hand loyal.)
There are a couple of tactics that a business can use to retain customers. First, they can install a loyalty program to reward customers for repeat purchases. Many restaurants are engaged in this kind of tactic, where customers get points for purchases and can use those points to get free menu items. Airlines do this with incredible results with a frequent flyer program.
Another way to install a loyalty program is to develop a customer relationship management approach to loyalty. You could track and aggregate customers who spend a lot of money with you, track their purchase frequency and reward customers who are well engaged with your business. On the flip side, you could also stimulate customers who haven’t bought from you in a while with something to come back to the store.
All these activities are great, but on the execution side of things, I think it’s important that the marketing department communicate the value of loyalty to the customer service people who serve customers at the point of sale or where the rubber meets the road. Training your staff to recognize people who are of a certain status with you or recognizing loyalty at the moment is crucial. You don’t want to do all this work on the back end and diminish your customers’ relationship with a clerk who either doesn’t know about the loyalty program(s) or worse, doesn’t care about it.
Conclusion
The Big Picture Framework is a unique and better framework for marketers to use in their work in their company. It’s a six-part framework that analyzes the following:
- Business Objective
- Marketing Objective
- Source of Volume
- STP (Segment, Targeting, and Positioning)
- Execute (Product, Price, Place, Promotion)
- Evaluation
This episode of Marketing Distilled discussed the basics in the first two parts of the framework, the Business Objective, and Marketing Objective. Stay tuned to the Marketing Distilled Podcast where the next episode will discuss Source of Volume and STP (Segmenting, Targeting, and Positioning).
