We are often asked by those around us what marketing exactly is, or more specifically, how communication can help small and medium-sized enterprises move forward today. There are countless answers to this question and we could bundle them into a massive book, but allow us to explain in a short, concise way how communication can help your company.
We would like to illustrate the role of communication using a concrete product as an example: a bottle of white wine. Now, we don’t know how much you know about wine, but let’s assume you know nothing about it and imagine there are 2 bottles of white wine on the table without labels. We ask you: which of these 2 bottles would you like to taste?
You probably feel like you can’t choose because you haven’t been given enough information. Quite right; making a choice in this case is very difficult and is based more on chance. Time to add the magic of product communication to make your choice easier.
What if we told you that the bottle on the left costs only half as much as the one on the right, which one would you buy? Exactly, the price makes the choice more logical. Either you don’t believe in cheap wine and you might choose the more expensive one (because it must be of higher quality). Or you choose the cheaper wine because you can hardly recognize the difference in taste yourself. As you can see, communicating price influences our purchasing decision.
But forget the price for a moment; both bottles cost the same. However, I can tell you that the wine on the right does everything to optimize the taste for women. Through continuous testing and optimization, the wine has evolved into a great female-friendly wine. Again, I ask you which wine you would like to taste.
Here, too, you have undoubtedly formed a preference between wine A or wine B. The conclusion? If your product/service focuses on a specific target group (old, young, male, female, large, small, etc.), do not hesitate to communicate this explicitly.
Okay, back to our 2 bottles with the same price and no gender focus.
This time we tell you that the wine on the right was made in France in a very traditional way by a family that has been making wine for 5 generations. They carefully pick the grapes by hand in their own vineyard. The wine gets its unique flavor from a secret family recipe passed down from father to son. The wine on the left is made fully automatically; from picking the grapes and pressing to filling the bottles, everything is done by machine. Again, I ask you which wine you would like to taste?
In the scenarios above, we have illustrated just a few examples of how a consumer’s product choice can be influenced by the right communication. You can see for yourself that, for example, price, the target group, or the story behind a product (authenticity) makes us more or less inclined to buy a certain product. And that’s without even considering more emotional elements such as color, shape, etc.
SMEs also often struggle with the question of how to get consumers to choose their “bottle of wine.” Often, for the customer—who has less prior knowledge—the difference between your product and that of the competitor is unrecognizable. The purchasing decision is then influenced by other factors. Optimally highlighting these factors in relation to your product (or service) and the market in which you operate is what communication is all about for us.
In our next blog post, we will present some concrete practical examples of brands that distinguish their products from those of competitors in various ways.