“You’re weird” pretty much sums up what we were taught in Julie Hennessy’s lectures on Marketing. The point being is that we are all individuals and that we shouldn’t assume because we behave in a certain way that everyone else does. Often companies will think that if their customers are behaving in an irrational way that the customers are stupid. Not true. You have to figure out why what the customer is doing makes sense to them. This lecture session pretty much turned everything I had thought about marketing on its head. I went in a bit skeptical, since the slides we had been offered as pre-reads were old-school blue background with yellow font. In today’s digital generation that is particularly frowned upon. How wrong was I. Julie’s session, I can’t call it a lecture because it wasn’t, was funny, engaging and thought-provoking.

I discovered that marketing isn’t an endpoint. It’s not advertising or selling a finished product. Marketing needs to be integrated throughout product or service development. Marketing can be used in conjunction with R&D to find cost savings opportunities, by understanding who your product is for and how they will use it. Take the digital camera for example. Lots of us own(ed) a fancy digital camera with a bazillion fancy features that we never use. To many people, like say your gran, these features were confusing and made life difficult. So gran continued using her film camera because it was easy to use and she got to print out the pictures and have a physical copy of them (yes, you can print out digital pictures, but have you ever tried explaining how you can do that to a technophobe?). Kodak recognised this and brought out a simple digital camera with  eight features and a printing dock to print your pictures directly. People were willing to pay similar money for that as they would for an infinitely more sophisticated camera. Sounds crazy, but this led to Kodak getting no. 1 in US market share in digital cameras. Simply because they understood how people were using their cameras and what they wanted from them. The upshot was that you shouldn’t ever think that features = benefits. Funnily enough this idea was also talked about in the Communications & Negotiations class I took before I came here. If you are negotiating or selling only benefits will sell, features won’t.

Another learning point was the idea that if a market is segmented you should target your product first and capture that segment. Then move onto the next segment… and the next…If you sit yourself in the middle of the market and try and be everything to everybody you’ll always make someone unhappy, and there will never be anyone who is ecstatic about your product. What else did I learn? Well, the flaw of averages (from Risk & Competitive Strategy) came back to haunt us. Don’t market to your average customer, mainly because they don’t exist. Diapers was an entertaining example. The people who use diapers are either aged 0-2 years old, or over 50. The age of the average diaper user is 10 years old. See where I am going with this? In order to market diapers effectively you need to target either the adult or the baby segment, not the average user since there are probably very few 10 year old diaper users.

The marketing session even extended as far as how you would pick a partner/spouse with segmentation. I won’t give the advice here because that just takes the fun out of it, plus you have no incentive to go to a marketing course after this (if you ask nicely in the comments I might share it). I have pages and pages of really great notes from this class, I hope I’ll get chance to use all the advice given. Applying it to Tech Transfer is easy and fits very well with the next blog post about David Schonthal’s lectures. Quite simply it is, take great pains to understand who your customer is and their needs. Only that way will you create a successful business.