Leverage the Customer Experience to Optimize Results
Note: This is a general description of the course. The workshop ranges from three to five days in length and content can be modified to meet the specific needs of your organization. It can also be structured to focus on either product management or product marketing.
Course Overview: Product Marketing and Product Management are important functions in every organization. Together, they champion the product through its entire product lifecycle, from inception through obsolescence. Success requires a product that meets or exceeds the customer’s expectations, together with a marketing message that establishes a clear, relevant and distinct position in the customers mind. This course examines the key activities that are required to achieve that outcome: starting with a discussion of the product from the customer’s point of view, it addresses identifying the target customers, engaging them with a compelling message, leveraging branding to enhance the attractiveness of the product, and using market research to understand the customers better than they understand themselves. Finally, we provide an opportunity to develop an action plan that you can use to apply the course learnings in your work environment.
Key Benefits of Participating in this Workshop:
- Increase the value of your product to your customer
- More effectively engage with your customers
- Develop loyal long-lasting customer relationships
- Position your product and reach your target market more efficiently
- Improve market penetration and profitability
- Use market intelligence to improve your effectiveness
- Learn tools that you can begin applying immediately
Who Should Attend:
This course is designed for involved in managing and marketing goods & services, including:
- Product Managers, Product Line Managers and those responsible for the leading the function
- Product Marketing Managers and others involved with increasing product revenue and profitability
- Marketing Managers and others involved with increasing market penetration and reaching new markets
Workshop Outline:
This course is designed to be highly interactive. In addition, there will be several group exercises that enable participants to share knowledge while reinforcing the key learning points.
1. Introduction
2. Leveraging the Customer Experience: Overview
3. Optimizing the Product
- Customers want solutions, while many vendors think in terms of products. In this session, we will introduce the “Complete Solution”, which is the full set of products and services that will compel your prospect to buy from you in the first place and then retain them as a loyal customer.
- Viewing the product through the customers’ eyes
- The basic product
- Increasing functionality: the extended product
- Enhancing product value using augmentations
3. Identifying Your Customer
- A good understanding of the marketplace can result in many product ideas – many more than are realistic to pursue. It becomes essential to segment the market and then pick those segments that represent the best fit with the resources and skills of the company.
- Market Segmentation
- Market Targeting
- Voice of the Customer (VOC) Methods
- Planning and Conducting a VOC Investigation
4. Reaching Your Customer
- Each target market requires its own particular blend of product, pricing, communications and ways of reaching the customer. It all starts with strong positioning (clear, relevant and differentiated) and extends to the overall marketing mix used to target that market
- Product Positioning
- Strengthening and Changing Your Positioning
- Target Marketing
5. Strengthening the Customer Relationship
- Strong brands are often the most important factor influencing product sales and building customer loyalty. Here, we will examine ways to use your product to strengthen the brand, and ways of using brands to help differentiate your product and boost sales. We will also address the need to ensure that the product delivers on customer expectations.
- Leveraging Your Brand
- Fulfilling the Brand Promise
6. Improving Your Customer’s Experience
- While the customer’s experience with the product is highly important, so too are other interactions between the customer and company representatives involving the sales process and after sales service/support. Here, we will discuss a systematic way of ensuring that the overall customer experience is outstanding.
- The Customer Journey
7. Increasing Your Effectiveness Using Market Intelligence
- Successful products require a thorough understanding of your market. There are many ways of increasing your customer knowledge, including in-depth interviews, focus groups and surveys. This section examines the common (and not so common) methods of obtaining input from customers and prospects, together with an approach to conducting research.
- Steps in the Market Research Process
- Types of Market Research
8. Case Problem: A multinational company whose product line is declining needs to decide if the product line is worth reviving and, if so, what steps must it take. We will then discuss what the company actually did, which resulted in reversing the decline and achieving 50% growth.
9. Applying the Course Material
Finally, we will discuss ways in which you can translate the material from the program into action and provide an opportunity for you to develop a concrete action plan for your use.
10. Developing Your Implementation Plan
(As time allows, the instructor will discuss additional topics of particular interest to the course attendees.)
During this highly interactive two day program, we will use examples and case studies to illustrate “best practices” and other specific learning that you can adapt to your organization. These companies include but are not limited to:
- Apple Computer
- McDonalds
- Kellogg’s
- Starbucks Coffee
- Microsoft
- Proctor & Gamble
- Samsung
- DHL