Story Marketing — What a Product Needs at Different Points in Its Life

Making a product or service is only one part of bringing it into the world. Someone also has to help the people who could use it find out why they might want it.

Where buyers already have plenty of choices, how a product reaches them can matter as much as getting it onto a shelf.

What Is Marketing?

It is easier to recognise marketing in an example than to put the whole field into one sentence. Yu Hye-seon and Seo Yong-gu give it a deliberately practical definition.

• They describe it as the work a marketer does to stay in business in a competitive market where customers have more to choose from than they need.

That work can give a product a place in someone’s mind and make it easier to recognise a brand when the time comes to choose. The authors’ broad definition can also be applied to the way a graduating student approaches a job search.

A qualification, a useful work sample and a self-introduction that gives someone a reason to remember you can all affect how an employer sees an application.

The Context Changes the Strategy

The book uses a life-cycle diagram to ask what a business or product needs at different points. The stages it considers include:

1. Introduction
2. Growth
3. Maturity
4. Decline
5. Recovery
6. Downturn

A product that needs to be noticed has a different problem from one people already know. The book’s argument is that the strategy should change as the problem changes.

Marketing at Introduction

At the beginning, the immediate task is to give people a clear way to recognise what you have made. The book offers several approaches:

1. Executive-led marketing — a chief executive can become the person customers associate with a company and give employees a figure to rally around. Examples include Gene Yoon at Fila and Yoon Seok-geum at Woongjin.
2. Numbers — a price such as ₩2,990 or a name such as Contac 600 or Dawn 808 gives a customer a number to remember. Numbers can also carry local associations, which need to be understood in context.
3. Colour — connecting a particular colour with a product can make it easier to recognise. The book uses the yellow packaging associated with Trust as an example.

Marketing during Growth

Sales are beginning to rise and some customers know the name. The task is to turn early recognition into a brand that can reach more people.

1. Word of mouth — the book recalls Jinro employees going out after work and asking for their company’s soju by name. It also points to Dimchae’s reputation among customers who recommended it to one another.
2. Viral marketing — social networks can spread a product through what people pass on rather than through paid media alone.
3. Marketing to women — the authors discuss products from Han Kyung-hee and Coway as examples of identifying a group of buyers with specific needs.
4. Emotional and experiential marketing — trials, store experiences and contests give people a feeling to associate with a name. Examples include Whisper, Starbucks, Mr. Pizza, Oakley and Duoback.

Marketing at Maturity

A mature product can sell reliably even when its sales stop growing. One possible move is to give customers a reason to pay for a more expensive version.

The book considers several forms of differentiation:

1. Luxury segmentation — the authors use the 80/20 idea to explain why a small group of buyers can be important. Banyan Tree Club & Spa Seoul is one example of aiming at a narrow premium market.
2. Prestige — price can be part of the way a product signals status. The book discusses the Veblen effect alongside brands such as Xi and Maybach.
3. Cultural marketing — use cultural activity to give a producer and its customers a way to meet.
4. Events — promotional parties can put the product inside an occasion. Examples include LG’s Cyon music party and J&B’s “Start a Party.”
5. Princess-themed marketing — build an offer around a recognisable idea of glamour.
6. Wellness marketing — address people interested in health and well-being.
7. Hospitality marketing — make the service a visible part of the offer.

Marketing in Decline

People can lose interest in something they once knew well. Pagers and early portable-phone services are the sort of product that makes deciding when to withdraw especially important.

1. Sports marketing — the book considers campaigns that drew on public feeling around figure skater Kim Yuna.
2. Below-the-line marketing — reach people through more targeted means such as an event, publicity, an in-store display or a promotion. The term is commonly distinguished from traditional mass-media advertising.
3. Place-based marketing — give a building or street a story, or use architecture and art to make the setting part of what customers came for. A shopping centre where people also spend their leisure time is one setting for this approach.
4. Environmental marketing — the book cites the Hampyeong Butterfly Festival and the Amenity Seocheon initiative.

The place someone associates with a product can become part of the reason to seek it out.

Marketing in a Downturn

A slowdown makes it harder to count on people buying out of habit. The book asks companies to pay closer attention to what particular customers and markets need.

1. Customer and local-market identity — the examples range from a staffing decision at the Barton Group to Tesco’s effort to combine local products and promotion with shared operating systems.
2. Bundling — put several products together in a package. The authors discuss Aekyung’s Kerasys as an example.
3. Street marketing — the examples include Yeongcheol Street Burger by Korea University, chicken skewers near Ewha and Seokbong Toast.

Marketing in Recovery

As demand starts to return, the book emphasises flexibility, visible results, clarity, usefulness and attention to different groups of customers.

1. Technology-led marketing — use a new tool where it gives people another way to encounter the product.
2. Nostalgia — use the memory of a place, practice or experience to make something familiar again.
3. Online marketing — use the speed of a direct exchange when there is a clear purpose for it.

A Primer That Starts with the Situation

The book ultimately asks the reader to work out where a product stands before choosing a method to promote it. That question travels better than any one campaign in the examples.

The ideas are presented at an introductory level. The Korean subtitle is accurate about the job the book can do: give a beginning reader a way to organise a crowded subject.

Book Information

Story Marketing: An Introduction for First-Time Readers (Korean title, translated)

Authors

Yu Hye-seon and Seo Yong-gu

Publication date

7 June 2010

ISBN

9788976774286

View the book at Kyobo

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