BED Model for Product Development - Joolz Joseph

Marketing is always evolving, so you need to keep tweaking and updating strategies. There are tons of marketing tactics out there, but if you stick to the 5Cs as your base, you’re more likely to succeed even when the next shiny toy comes along to distract you from what matters!

Little Girl in Mums Shoes

1. Customer-Centric:

Anyone who has ever seen me present on marketing knows the focus I put on putting yourself in your customers shoes. Understand their needs, desires, interests, pain points, and buying behaviours.

Conduct thorough market research, gather customer feedback, and look at the entire customer journey. So many campaigns fail because after a great promotion and amazing creative, the buying process is clunky and illogical. Start with promotions that resonate with your target audience(s) but remember to test out the entire experience.

For other people it may be a particular kind of advice, a standard product (e.g. jewellery or a specific beverage) or training (e.g. yoga teacher)

And use my BED model to focus on how your product addresses those needs, even in a competitive market.

Think about how you would want to be treated and apply that to how you interact with your audience. Remembering that marketing is about ore than a sale.

Octopus Energy does this particularly well, even using customers in it’s adverts (although I confess to finding them a bit irritating). Pleasing customers in the energy sector, where prices have been increasing and trust is low, is a challenging task. However, Octopus Energy has successfully navigated these challenges, rising to the top of the sector, with a focus on customer experience and support. Their commitment to customers has earned them a high brand health score and Which? Recommended Provider status for seven consecutive years.

2. Connection:

Marketing is about relationships and getting your audience to know, like and trust you by building genuine connections. Yes, engage with them on social media, respond to their comments and enquiries promptly, and create a sense of community around your brand.

But take it further through other channels, such as segmented email campaigns that align with past behaviour.

Trust is a key word here – don’t abuse this. One example is misleading ‘clickbaity’ subject lines or promotions. Instead work on how you can deepen you trust with customers such as offering exclusive perks to develop them into brand advocates.

A good relationship starts with making your audience feel good about you from the first interaction and ensuring this positive feeling continues throughout their journey with you. The 8th P of Marketing for modern marketers is Participation, and that’s how you’ll connect with your audience.

One brand that’s good at this is Greggs, who definetly have a playful nature. Their 2024 Greggs Top Trumps game highlighted this, being fun and quirky whilst also keeping favourite food front and centre. 5 years before this they launched sausage roll makeup palettes and they also have a successful partnership with Primark and their clothing line.

3. Consistent:

Consistency is key across all customer touchpoints. Maintain a consistent brand voice, messaging, and visual identity across your marketing channels. This builds brand recognition, familiarity and loyalty among your audience.

Consistency doesn’t mean the same everywhere, but it does mean you shouldn’t be contradicting your brand! Your approach on LinkedIn will be different to Instagram very often due to the nature of the media. Instagram is very visual, whereas on LinkedIn long form content works well so there will be nuances.

Start by knowing your Mission, Vision and Values as an organisation. These will feed into a clear tone of voice and messaging style, but will also inform your colour palette, fonts, and imagery. Ultimately they will determine your culture and customer experience too.

Over time, your audience will come to know and trust what your brand stands for, leading to greater loyalty and advocacy.

Nvidia experienced significant growth in 2024, being named as the fastest-growing brand in the world according to Kantar’s BrandZ analysis, with a 178% year-on-year increase in brand value. Nvidia is a chipmaker operating in various sectors including gaming, research, and automotive – but the common value across their target audience is an interest in innovation. The company emphasizes innovation and high-performance computing in its messaging whether aimed at businesses or consumers. For instance, their #RTXOn campaign promotes the GeForce RTX graphics cards to gamers by showcasing in-game performance improvements with real-time ray tracing.

4. Concise:

This has so many applications when it comes to marketing – volume, channels, message and sustainability are key.

Quality Over Quantity. Marketing isn’t about reaching as many people as possible, but about reaching the right people and making a genuine connection with them. With AI it is easy to spurt out more content than ever before, but if it isn’t the right content and doesn’t resonate, you will end up damaging not advancing your brand and customer relationships.

Also remember that in today’s fast-paced digital world, attention spans are short. People are not reading your carefully crafted posts or emails, they are scanning them initially and if you’re, lucky will top and read. So, keep your marketing messages concise and to the point. Your goal is to get them to the next stap in the journey – you don’t have to tell them everything up front. Avoid jargon and use clear, simple language that is easy to understand so people can grasp your message quickly.

With 41% ad spend being wasted according to Next&Co’s annual Digital Media Wastage, addressing this can save money for all involved. Going back to my first point, think about your audience first. Annoying or intrusive digital ad experiences have been shown to create huge wastage in ad spend, by actively putting off the very consumers they hoped to win over. And when it comes to the message itself, we don’t have the inclination to read realms of text very often, especially when we first engage so get your core message in fast.

Some brands do this particularly well with, such as Spotify’s tag line “Music for Every Mood” which succinctly conveys the platform’s value proposition and acts as a teaser to find out roe about the music for your own mood.

5. Calibrate:

Tweak regularly by analysing your marketing data to track the performance of your campaigns.

This means monitoring key metrics such as website traffic, social media engagement, email opens/clicks, conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI). Benchmarks can be useful, but you’re unique so remember that and look to continually improve your own results. Also consider when the tools you use change and any impact this has on our data. Then look at the results and use these to calibrate your strategies, identify areas for improvement, and optimise your marketing efforts.

Going, an online travel deals company, used A/B testing to improve their conversion rates in 2023. By tweaking their call to action (CTA), they saw a triple-digit increase in conversions. They tested two variations on their homepage: “Sign up for free” versus “Trial for free”. This case study, with Unbounce, demonstrates how small changes can significantly impact marketing outcome

 

By embracing the 5Cs – Customer-Centric, Consistent, Connection, Concise, and Calibrate – you can create a strong foundation for your marketing efforts in this constantly evolving industry.

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