Great week! I really enjoyed the videos, particularly the one by Hans Rosling! Chapter 3 in the book was also enlightening – I hadn’t thought of defining a market at the five basic levels presented: potential market, available market, qualified available market, served or target market, and finally, the penetrated market.
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| Chevrolet Volt |
At General Motors, we are a data driven company. We use enormous amounts of information to drive our decisions. Whether it’s a high level portfolio decision or a down-in-the-trenches engineering decision regarding a single part on a vehicle, the expectation is to research the choices and present the data to support the decision.
With regards to our customers, we routinely collect this data from many different sources. Typically these sources include customer clinics, external surveys such as the New Car Buyers Survey (NCBS) and JD Power Survey, internal surveys of new customers, extensive media reviews (magazines such as Consumer Reports, newspapers, internet reviews, etc.), and most recently, customer profiling. The real challenge is distilling all of this information down to a meaningful summary so it can be used during the decision making process. Dr. Rosling’s video addresses just this concern – that obtaining and displaying data is very difficult, yet extremely important. I was thoroughly impressed with his newfound ways to display data and trends over time. Having the data is one thing, but communicating it to your audience is another. Dr. Rosling’s techniques are awesome – his audience is engaged and is immediately able to visualize the data and associated historical trends.
In constructing our marketing plan, I will utilize many different sources of data. First, sales numbers are readily available on corporate websites. This will allow me to calculate and understand the current market share results. Secondly, existing competitors will be explored – both their current/historical products and marketing techniques. Third, many media outlets will be explored to gain insight into customers in the alternative fuel vehicle market. These will consist of magazines such as Consumer Reports to obtain important customer feedback and to help profile our typical customers and their expectations. Important customer data such as household income, geographical location, lifestyle choices, and attitudes is also readily available from internet sources (although the source must be carefully considered).
The video by Malcolm Gladwell reinforced an anecdote from our former VP of Engineering Product Development – Bob Lutz. I heard Lutz mention this in his internal speeches several times, as well as in his business book, Guts. He states that customers don’t know what they want, so we have to tell them what they want and give/sell it to them. Gladwell comes to a similar conclusion in the video, and I really enjoyed the stories about Pepsi and Ragu/Prego spaghetti sauce. I look forward to watching more videos from both Gladwell and Rosling.
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| Cadillac Converj Hybrid Concept Car |
Lastly, I enjoyed the point about pricing to engage customers. I would like to research this further, as I think there is merit to understanding this more in-depth and in trying to define where the “tipping point” may be… ie, how high is high enough and how high is too much to stagnate sales. I do believe that customers can be biased towards a product just by its price point. Take Old Navy/Gap/Banana Republic for instance – I’m sure most of the clothes are sourced from the same materials and factories, but the higher priced Gap and Banana Republic lines command a thought of higher quality merely by their price point. In the auto industry in which I work, I think this is true as well with brands such as Lexus (really just Toyota), Acura (Honda), Infiniti (Nissan), and Cadillac (GM) being outlets for re-badged and slightly re-engineered products that produce demand in part because of their higher prices that infer quality and sophistication.
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