Kenichi Ohmae, a Japanese organizational theorist, is credited with creating the 3Cs of the Marketing model in 1982. The model places primary emphasis on the three fundamental components that constitute the marketing strategy of any firm. This ensures that a company attracts customers before its competitors.
When an organization has completed this analysis, it can determine the critical success factors for its marketing strategy.
What Are The 3 Cs of Marketing, And How Are They Helpful?
The three 3 Cs of marketing are
- Customers
- Competition
- Company
This model helps businesses identify and analyze customer needs, understand the competition and assess the company’s strengths and weaknesses to support customer needs and remain ahead of the competition.
The 3 Cs of Marketing help an organization find its competitive edge after analyzing its competition and customer needs. The organization then can make changes to improve performance.
1- The Customer
Customers are the single most critical factor in the success of any company. There is no such thing as a successful firm that does not have consumers, and the marketing model that utilizes the 3Cs places primary emphasis on the requirements of the customers.
The model recommends analyzing the consumers to understand their requirements, as well as the adjustments that need to be made by the company to maximize customer satisfaction, retention, and conversion.
If the company is unfamiliar with its target market, it can analyze the demographic data, disposable income levels, impulsiveness, the requirement for after-sales services, product demand, how clients know about the product, etc.
This assists firms in defining consumer strategy, ultimately improving the business’s marketing process.
Interviews, surveys, questionnaires, and other methods, as well as customer feedback, can all be used to acquire information from consumers.
The following questions will help businesses in conducting a customer-centric analysis:
- Who are the business’s customers, genders, incomes, and demographics?
- Why do the customers buy products?
- How elastic is the product’s demand for the customers?
- What is the business’ customer share in the market?
- Where do they buy the product from?
- How did they get information about the products?
- What are the customers’ unmet needs, and are they easily identifiable?
- Are the customers satisfied with the products and services>
- How can businesses improve their product or services?
- How do the customers decide not to buy from the competitors?
- How many customers does the business have?
- Who are the most valued business customers?
When the company has all of this information, it can determine its target demographic, its customers’ demands, and the product’s value in the eyes of those customers. After this step, they will be able to design a value proposition for the product in response to customers’ unmet wants and give those customers what they require rather than waiting to create an audience for an existing product with customer needs that do not now exist.
The organization’s marketing team and the teams responsible for product development, brand positioning, public relations, customer experience design, and communications can perform more effectively with customer-related strategies.
2- The Competition
A company needs to analyze its competitors to understand the industry’s prospects, threats, capabilities, strengths, product portfolios, and value propositions. This enables firms to understand how their competitors brand themselves, allowing them to modify anything in their presentation that seems disproportionate and better conform to the standards of the market in a way that is distinctive to them.
Companies can benefit from conducting competitor research since it helps them spot chances for differentiating their offerings and filling in the gaps that their main competitors are overlooking. Companies must concentrate their efforts on outperforming the top three competitors in the market.
The organization researches the top three industry rivals. It evaluates them in terms of their businesses’ functioning, operations, and branding. This will supply the company with information regarding everything that the competitor is doing correctly as well as everything that they are doing incorrectly.
Analyzing a competitor’s business can be accomplished by going to the company’s website and physical locations to learn about the goods they provide, signing up for the company’s newsletter, speaking with the company’s staff, and even becoming one of their customers.
Once a company has become a customer of a competitor’s brand, that company is privy to information regarding how the rival brand serves its customers and how the firm might improve its level of service to clients.
A user test can compare a company’s offerings to those of its digital and physical rivals. An ideal mechanism to verify how a company ranks online in comparison to the rank of a competitor on a search engine is a search engine optimization (SEO) tool.
Obtaining information about the competitor’s SEO strategy will assist the company in determining what adjustments need to be made to their keywords and profile driven by SEO to rank higher online. Large companies use rival website analysis tools to obtain helpful information and incorporate it into their operations to improve business performance.
Gathering hard and soft data about the competitors helps businesses create a brand strategy.
The first step toward gathering this data is to answer the following questions –
- Who are the business’ biggest rival brands/competitors in the market?
- What are the competitor’s market and customer share vs. the business’?
- Are the customers also buying from the business’ competitors?
- How strong of a competition/threat are they to the business?
- How do the competitors make high revenue?
- What is the reason behind the competitors losing sales?
- What are the competitors’ goals, capabilities, strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and value propositions?
- What do the competitors offer that the business does not?
The business can find answers to the above questions by going through the competitor’s annual reports, researching their website, understanding their customer relationships, and asking the business’ sales team to research the rival brand’s customers.
3- The Company
The last C in the 3 Cs of Marketing is the company. The term “company analysis” refers to researching the corporation and coming up with marketing plans that will assist them in the progression of its business. Tools such as Google Analytics, annual reports of the company, sales, revenue in the preceding years, and other comparable data sets can be used to analyze the company’s strengths, weaknesses, and the factors contributing to the difficulties.
The company might conduct a market survey in which respondents were asked what they liked and disliked about the company and its rivals, as well as chat with its customers about the feedback provided by those consumers.
When company data is analyzed, businesses can discover what kinds of information users are most interested in. The users’ needs are then compared to the goods and services provided by the company to identify potential areas for improvement in the company’s marketing strategy and overall performance.
Once the data and customer feedback have been analyzed, the company can classify itself as either a service-oriented business in which the satisfaction of customers is the primary focus, an innovation-oriented business in which the achievement of product leadership is the primary goal, or an operations-oriented business in which the achievement of price leadership is the primary goal.
It is possible for businesses to combine all three of these strategies to corner the market and establish their goals, objectives, disciplines, values, and areas of excellence and weakness.
The following questions can help understand business.
- What are the business’ vision and end goal?
- What is the business’ overall strategy?
- What sort of market is it where the business is competing?
- What is the total product cost of the business vs. the revenue?
- What is the value of the product to existing and potential customers?
- What are the price differences between the business and the competitor’s products?
- What are the business pricing strategies?
- What makes the business better or below the competitors?
- What is the unique selling proposition of the business?
- What components does the business outsource, and what is made in-house?
- What is the goodwill of the business in the market?
- What are the organizational culture, revenue streams, and business’ past performance?
- Does the business have strong brand recognition?
- What is the SWOT analysis?
When the analysis is completed, businesses can make a unique standpoint in the market and stand out from the competition to reach their target audience with a competitive advantage.
Example of 3 Cs of Marketing
Let us consider an example of a business named ABC Limited, a new generation smartphone company, using the 3 Cs of the Marketing model.
The first step in the process is a customer analysis, during which the company researches its current clientele and ideal demographic. According to the data, more than half of their clientele are between the ages of 20 and 35. As a result, the company can advance by correctly identifying and responding to the requirements of its customers.
Next, ABC limited moves ahead to understand the market competition that focuses on a similar age group of people and offers a similar product – smartphones.
Competitor analysis enables the company to understand that the top three rival brands in the market only focus on launching new smartphones every six months but less focus on the after-sales services and the accessories division. As a result, ABC limited concluded that the best way to differentiate itself from the competition was to establish a distinct market sector for smartphone accessories and enhance the quality of its after-sales services.
Lastly, ABC limited company analyses to see if its strategies are working in its favor and if they need some changes.
The analysis shows the company’s sales have increased over the years, but the profits have not increased as much. This is because the corporation did not reduce operating expenses yet still sells smartphones at the most competitive prices. Because of this, the company decides to adopt a cost-leadership strategy to ensure that its earnings grow at the same rate as its sales and that the business is successful.
How To Implement The 3 Cs of Marketing Into a Business Strategy
1- Determine the Business’ Strengths
To put the 3 Cs of Marketing strategy into action, businesses first need to determine their strengths in the market.
Learn how the company serves the target market, maintains methods that strengthen the brand, reduces waste, and never stops looking for ways to get better. This assists the company in determining its primary function and enhancing it further to stay one step ahead of the competition.
2- Improve the Customer-Relationship
Developing customer-driven marketing initiatives can help a company connect with its clientele and improve client relationships. The more a company interacts with the people that follow it, the more that audience will trust the company and continue using its goods or services.
In the world that is driven by social media today, having a social presence can help businesses target niche customers, talk to customers one-on-one, take feedback, listen to grievances, act on the problems, respond to comments, conduct surveys and polls that are engaging, and create a powerful brand presence with a human touch.
In addition, social media makes it possible to monitor what customers are saying about the brand and make adjustments to the product if there are any recurring problems.
3- Get Customers’ Feedback
After developing good relationships with consumers and gaining a grasp of what customers are saying about the company online, businesses are in a position to move forward with soliciting feedback from customers.
This feedback has the potential to be incorporated into the 3 Cs of Marketing strategy to enhance business processes, product quality, and overall operations. Additionally, this assists companies in keeping up with the demand for their products.
Businesses have the opportunity to develop and improve their operations through the utilization of consumer input and the subsequent fulfillment of customer demands. This contributes to an increase in profitability as well as sales and income. Feedback can be taken through surveys, questionnaires, polls, offline meetings, sampling, focus group meetings, and online reviews.
4- Build a Strong Business Presence
A successful marketing plan is a product of a strong brand strategy. The organization’s success rate increases when the business improves its brand presence. The marketing team is responsible for presenting new ideas to help a business have a strong brand by defining its brand values, goals, vision, and mission.
Brand logo, social media presence, tone, customer response, and after-sales services strengthen the brand value.
5- Measure Progress and Maintain Consistency
Once the business has implemented the 3 Cs of Marketing strategy, it is time to measure the progress and determine how close they are to its objectives.
After that, devise a method that can be followed reliably to continue marketing efforts and gain knowledge from the errors made by competitors so that the company can remain one step ahead of the competition. This enables the company to improve the quality of the judgments it makes in the future and to create rules and procedures that are more resilient, both of which contribute to the success of the company.
Conclusion
For businesses to obtain an advantage over their competitors in the market, the “3 Cs of Marketing Strategy” assist firms in concentrating on consumers, competitors, and the corporation itself. The results of all three assessments were combined into a single report, which provides the company with a comprehensive explanation of what it is doing, what it should be doing, and how it might enhance its product, services, and operations.
If a business fails to use the 3 Cs of the Marketing strategy, competitors in the market can capture the business’ existing and potential customers. Therefore, it is essential to undertake the 3 Cs of Marketing study consistently and keep the company up to date on the current market conditions.