CoGen Marketing

Marketing is a process that follows product life-cycle.  In its simplest form, marketing creates preference and awareness for products resulting in sales leads.  Behind this simple definition is research, pricing, competitive analysis, project management, channel development, end-of-life management...all encompassing strategic and tactical demands.  Marketing activities include offensive and defensive positioning dictated by market and competitive conditions.  And, marketing projects always fall into one of two categories:  In-bound and Out-bound.  All of these marketing activities are encompassed in four major marketing processes: 

• Product Generation:  how do you define product that will truly sell?
• Demand Generation:  how do you create demand for your products?
• Order Generation:  how are orders generated and fulfilled?
• Loyalty Generation:  how are you designing customer loyalty into your products and company?

The key is to achieve customer resonance at every touch-point you have with your customers.  CoGen Marketing can help you simplify and fine-tune your messaging in customer terms.

Long before public introduction, there are many steps to ensure that true customer problems will be satisfied with your new product.  There is nothing more disappointing than going to market with a product that does not sell.  Through the discovery and definition processes, a value proposition is created based on primary and secondary research which includes the general market, competitive offerings and potential customers.  This value proposition is refined and tested during the debate and decision processes.

The value proposition is the guide post throughout design and development of the product, the marketing plan, internal and external training, the sales plan...every thing about the product and every touch point to the product must be aligned to the value proposition.  This requires discipline to stay on track and avoid the lure of adding functionality that was not tested with customers or removing functionality that was tested with customers. 

While product generation is busy developing the new product, marketing is busy developing messaging, collateral, training, and an introduction plan with strategically timed events.

Product life-cycle repeats within itself many times bringing new features and capabilities to market extending the life-cycle of the original product.  Each new sub-life-cycle is a similar process to the over-arching product life-cycle requiring similar marketing processes.  Communicating value, managing the customer experience, pricing strategies become delicate and challenging as end-of-life approaches. 

Whether you’re a startup or a Fortune 50 company, whether your offering is a simple service or a highly complex configured system, whether your budgets are large or small – the Process of Marketing will lead you to the greatest results.  You are probably completing most of the steps in the process of marketing already – but are you using processes to complete the steps?  Are you meeting your business objectives?  If not, CoGen Marketing can help you fill in the blanks, follow the process, and get the results you are in business to achieve.