• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Next Wavelength Logo

Next Wavelength

Full Stack Digital Marketing Agency

  • Home
  • About Us
  • Services
    • Analytics
    • Branding
    • Content Marketing
    • E-Commerce
    • Marketing Automation
    • Performance Marketing
    • SEO
    • Social Media Marketing
    • Website Design & Development
  • Next Hub
  • Get in touch
  • Call +971522718034

Analytics

Don’t Kill Your Marketing: Learn Market Sophistication

January 10, 2021 by nxtwvlgth

Market sophistication is sort of a barometer for figuring out how many marketing messages, tactics and strategies a market has already been exposed to.

Every single market has a different level of market sophistication.

As the market becomes more mature, tactics and strategies will stop working or not deliver the expected results.

Does that mean the market is dead? No, but your marketing tactics are.

To better demonstrate the concept, I’ll be focusing mainly on the fitness industry – it has been pounded to dirt and is one of the most difficult markets to break into.

The 5 Levels of Market Sophistication

Level One – The market is fresh and your product or service is completely new or innovative. This is a pretty rare situation, but if you are lucky enough to be in such a market, the best approach with your claim is to be direct. You don’t need to elaborate your messaging here.

Level Two – There is fierce competition and you need to assert that you’re above the competition.

If your business is in this market, then it’s probably best to look at what ‘1st to market’ are already doing, how they are advertising, what claims they are making, and then enlarging on their claims.

In fitness, the 1st to market must have been claiming “reduce 5 kilos”, the competition came along and said “reduce 5 kilos in 10 days”.

Another thing that happens is the change in marketing terminology – from “fat reducing” to “weight loss diet” to “paleo” – when all of them are the same thing.

Level Three – This is where the problem arises – businesses have already copied the competitors tens of times.

The market repeatedly hears it to the point that they stop believing. Your best claims are like firing bullets on a Kevlar armor!

Even if your ad says “this will float fat right out of your body” – it wouldn’t sell your product.

This is one of the drawbacks of the so-called “competitor analysis”. Most marketers get stuck there and are unable to move or break through.

There is awareness of the claims made for your products and services, but not exactly how it all actually works. This is most likely the market situation of your business.

So what do you do when the market is in its 3rd stage of sophistication? Instead of explicitly selling your product you need to market the “how” of your product or service.

You need to shift the tactics from simple competitor analysis (doubling down) and start showing how the product works. Especially how it impacts your customer’s life and helps them achieve their goals and desires.

Something from “floats fat right out of your body” to maybe “blocks the absorption of fat in your intestine.”

Here’s the bad news though.

Your competitor will see what you’re doing, copy it and double down on it – until the rest of the market falls in line and educational content becomes the norm, leaving the best of your customers with skepticism.

Unless you were the 1st to adopt this tactic, simply educating your customers will not cut it.

This is when the market sophistication reaches level 4.

Level Four – It is just a continuation of elaboration and doubling down. Businesses are competing to capture the hearts and minds of the buying public. You have to ensure that the claims you’re making are in fact truthful, or you risk losing trust and business.

Level Five – It’s safe to say your market is completely saturated or nearly dead. Nearly dead because it’s very rare for a market to completely die off.

Customers in the market are fully aware of your product, your competitors, as well as the claims and tactics that you’ve employed so far.

What To Do When Market Sophistication Reaches Level Five

Start bringing in some uniqueness to your content, instead of simply educating your customers about the product like everyone else in your market.

A content-tilt maybe.

In fitness industry one of these content tilts can be “self-image identification”.

It means, you’re not just telling people about the process of becoming what they want to become, but you’re taking them on a journey with you.

Perception is reality after all!

I really like the example of Kino Body’s, Greg O’Gallagher.

Greg is selling lifestyle not fitness products – his mission statement is “transforming civilians into movie star shape in the simplest way possible”.

He not only delivers on the promise, but makes you self-identify with himself and the rest of his clients, who have found success with his products and training methods.

Wrap Up

So summing it up:

  • Figure out your market sophistication level before going all in.
  • Don’t get stuck in the doubling-down “competitor analysis strategy.”
  • If your market is saturated, i.e. “nearly dead”, find your content tilt.

You might also enjoy

red-bull-plane

The Most Important Content Marketing Lessons from Red Bull

CONTINUE READING The Most Important Content Marketing Lessons from Red Bull

Content Marketing - Learn form the best

Content Marketing: You Learn From The Best

CONTINUE READING Content Marketing: You Learn From The Best

Filed Under: Analytics, Content Marketing

Impact of Digital on Marketing and How the Geeks Took Over

December 30, 2020 by nxtwvlgth

Going back twenty years from now we can divide the age of internet into four digital epochs.

Since the purchase of the first banner ad by AT&T on hotwire.com, up until now: the age of unicorns.

4-Digital-Epochs

Unicorn is a term which describes tech startups with the evaluation of $1 billion.

Neither Google nor Amazon was ever worth $1 billion as a private company but we’re at a point where we have herds of unicorns – startups having the magical $1 billion valuation before going public.

It’s the digital epoch of prosperity.

After tracing the Internet age, it’s interesting to look at marketing over this period of 20 years, especially the year 2005 after the bubble and the burst but before Facebook had taken roots.

Proctor & Gamble came out with a three step marketing model and called it The First Moment of Truth.

This model proposed that the consumer needs some sort of stimulus. It can either be an ad or something that triggers a need to have a certain product.

Maybe they run out of the product, maybe they hear about another through their social network – but the stimulus happens.

3-steps

This model proposed that the consumer needs some sort of stimulus.

It can either be an ad or something that triggers a need to have a certain product.

Maybe they run out of product, maybe they hear about another through their social network – but the stimulus happens.

Next step involves the first moment of truth where consumers find themselves in the market with a number of different options and they must choose.

According to P&G this is the real battleground where brands have to fight for attention and get themselves noticed over the others.

And the second moment of truth happens after a consumer makes a purchase decision and gets home with the product. Does the product live up to its expectations? This experience is vital, both for the consumer as well as the brand.

This model of marketing was coined in 2005 but the world is not quite the same as it was back then.

before digital age

A picture is worth a thousand words.

This is right around the time that P&G has released its theory.

It describes consumer behavior at the installation of Pope Benedict in Rome in St Peter’s Square.

Then eight short years later, the same place in 2013 at the installation of Pope Francis, you can notice the dramatic change in consumer behavior.

after digital age

All due to the mobile technology which exploded during this time.

Our devices became so much more powerful every single year and got smaller and smaller.

They became a vital part of our lives – forever changing our shopping experience.

It became possible for consumers to gain access to any kind of product information or nearly any person they wanted to connect with.

This is the reason why Google introduced the idea of ZMOT in 2011, The Zero Moment of Truth.

Bare-Organics-4

Zero Moment of Truth is the time between stimulus and the first moment of truth when consumers are collecting information about the brands, doing evaluations, checking their social network to see how they feel about certain products.

They are also leaving behind a trail of online data while collecting these inputs.

The studies conducted by Google in 2011 determined the new buyer’s journey:

  • 50 percent of shoppers used a search engine to research a product or brand.
  • 38 percent comparison shopped online (reviews, prices and so on).
  • 36 percent checked out the brand/manufacturer’s website.
  • 31 percent read online endorsements, reviews or recommendations.

Follow up study of 2014 suggested that approximately one-third of all CPG(Consumer Packaged Goods) searches now originate from smartphones.

When consumers are moving around to different websites and social media channels, it’s an important time to understand them so they can still be moved in their decision.

Consumers are producing and exposing a vast amount of data about themselves.

Not exactly a neat picture though, it’s messy all the way through from receiving a stimulus till the point of purchase.

Eventually more marketers in the meeting rooms started asking the question – what is the data telling us?

This is the moment where the true impact of digital can be observed and digital marketing really kicks in.

Facebook’s success as one of the biggest companies in the world is built entirely around the extraction of consumer data.

We gladly offered our information and invested our precious time on it.

Now if I say Facebook knows more about us than our friends and family, it wouldn’t be wrong.

No other platform probably has as much consumer data as Facebook.

They use it to full effect by targeting specific ads at millions of users everyday while offering Facebook Analytics to track consumer behavior on the social network.

Google is yet another giant.

It’s dominating the internet with tools like Google Adwords, Google Analytics and many more – providing marketers the ability to track behavior online and subsequently targeting consumers throughout their journey.

But operating these tools in an efficient manner requires an analyst(geek) who can collect information from this data and draw some sort of conclusions.

The dominant strategic forces within marketing started sharing the power of decision making with geeks.

Characteristics of a geek:

  • A geek is someone who is obsessed with data and excel sheets.
  • Someone who regularly seeks and tries to understand patterns in everything related to consumer behavior, business events and marketing programs.
  • He knows buls*** when he sees one and calls it for what it is.

This is how the geeks took over a field which was traditionally driven by big creative personalities.

You might also like

Facebook ads targeting

4 bold changes Meta made in Facebook Ads Targeting

CONTINUE READING 4 bold changes Meta made in Facebook Ads Targeting

15 Facebook Marketing Statistics 2021

15 Awesome Facebook Marketing Statistics You Need to Know in 2021

CONTINUE READING 15 Awesome Facebook Marketing Statistics You Need to Know in 2021

Filed Under: Analytics

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Analytics
  • Content Marketing
  • Digital Marketing
  • E-Commerce
  • Paid Media
  • SEO
  • Uncategorized
  • Web Design and Development

Email newsletter

Sign up to receive updates and to hear what's going on with our company!

Footer

Facebook

LinkedIn

Instagram

Ajman Falcon Tower B1,
Office No. 1511,
Ajman - UAE

+971 522 718034

[email protected]

Sydney Suite 703, Level 7
The Trust Building
155 King Street
Sydney NSW 2000
AUSTRALIA

+61 432 958 550

[email protected]

REQUEST A QUOTE

SERVICES

  • Analytics
  • Branding
  • Content Marketing
  • E-commerce
  • Marketing Automation
  • Performance Marketing
  • SEO
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Web Design & Development

Copyright © 2022 Next Wavelength. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy | Sitemap