Using the extended marketing mix to help foster innovation

Overview

This is an outline for a practical workshop using what Seedgen terms the extended marketing mix development framework to drive innovation.

Over the course of a workshop a summary sheet pulls together key observations on the strengths and weaknesses of a business' offer to prospective target markets, analysed with respect to each characteristic of what is collectively referred to as the 'extended marketing mix' (summarized below).

Opportunities to innovate so as to bolster current competitive advantages and counter competitive threats are then identified, before these are then prioritised for follow-up action.

Diagram - how a large marked up sheet might look, with prioritised innovative ideas ranked upon it at the end of a workshop.

 
Practicalities

Depending on how it is to be applied the workshop takes between one hour and an entire day to run.

It is essential that all members of the workshop have a good appreciation of both the business' target markets of it its current offers into these before the session begins.

It is also essential that members have a reasonable appreciation of what is meant by each element of the extended marketing mix - a summary is presented below.

Ideas are best captured on a large flip-pad or whiteboard, with ALL elements of the mix shown together

Depending on the organisation, allow 1 – 2 days for pre-planning and 1-2 days after the implementation session, for ‘sign-off’, to get the best outcome.

Extended marketing mix overview

The Extended Marketing Mix’s ‘7 Ps’ are:

• Product: the physical elements of what the customer purchases
• Price: ideally set so both you and the customer profit
• Place: providing access for convenient purchase or ‘consumption’
• Promotion: generating awareness and a desire to purchase
• People: your people, reassuring the customer of value
• Physical presence: elements that give your offer’s intangibles, ‘weight’
• Process: maximising the efficiency & pleasure of the customer experience

The Extended Marketing Mix adds three ‘attributes’ to the traditional ‘4 Ps’ of Product, Price, Place & Promotion

Meant to cater for ‘Services’ the Extended Mix is universally useful in that no product is sold without some service

Working through the framework, example 1

The above illustration is based on a real piece of work conducted in the 1990's looking at how a major UK telephone  company might win more business from the big national vehicle breakdown support networks.

Focussing purely on the product attribute of what was being offered to these business customers, with respect to strengths and weaknesses and opportunities the threats, sparked the insights seen above.

Importantly, in this 'business to business' setting, the framework was employed to analyse how the telephone company could help boost these target customers' offerings to their prospective customers. 

Interestingly, recently one of the main breakdown service providers has sought to differentiate their offer by focusing on the automatic mobile phone location capability they have in their advertisements.

In the workshop there can be one or several passes down through the mix attributes of the framework. In this particular workshop, the first pass collected rough bullet-points that were then revisited and refined in a second pass to result in what was later summarised as above.

Working through the framework, example 2

In the same workshop as discussed above, after ideas dried up on the product attribute, we moved onto the price attribute and then onwards through the rest of the mix.

As before on a second pass we tidied up and refined our thoughts.

In this particular workshop a handful of very useful ideas were prioritised for follow up development work. Some of these ideas were then 'parked' but a couple of the headline proposals fed into compelling business cases for follow-on investment, which in turn lead to doing significantly more business in this sector.

Workshop tips

Clarify scope and authority of the brainstorming team before prioritising issues and developing implementation plans, otherwise ‘sign-off’ may be difficult

Markets and the means to serve them profitably never stand still, for you or your competitors so do not get locked into a fixed way of thinking about these issues

Seek to work with your suppliers and complimentary service or product suppliers as a means to jointly strive to win greater market share

Useful for both consumer and business markets. If customers are businesses, explore how your mix attributes could benefit the ‘customer’s customers’

Ideally this tool should not be used in isolation, but as part of a wider market study

Summary

This extended marketing mix idea development framework can help businesses to rapidly identify and pursue opportunities to gain competitive advantage.

This process is an excellent, rapid results addition to a market leakage analysis, explored elsewhere on this site.

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