As I was reading Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson, I found an interesting story about how Steve Jobs and Bill Gates differ so much. The story tells that After NeXT (where Jobs worked after being fired from Apple) received a 100-plus-page contract from IBM, Jobs slammed it on the table and said, “Come back with a two-to-three-page contract … you don’t get it.” At the same time, a contract was offered to Microsoft, concerning the possibility to cooperate on building windows. It was 220 pages long. Bill Gates did the same thing, but he asked IBM to re-send him a more detailed contract. The result was 336 pages long contract.
In the previous article, I have written about whether marketers should differentiate their marketing program for both student and employees – two different market segments. In this section, now I think it is important to show why and how marketers set a different successful marketing program for both segments on one particular product.
"Involvement refers to how much time, thought, energy and other resources people devote to the purchase process" (Brian-AdCracker)
Consumers are willing to spend much time on them when the product or service is important to some extent on a particular are of their life. There are some products that seem to be equally important to all people. House, car, and major electronics are examples in which people generally need to know the details about those products before making a purchase decision.
However, the importance level is different for many products. Some products have high involvement to some customers; the others have low for another. Perfume, for example, has high involvement for actors/ actress but low one for students. Ideally, when a company launches its perfume, one should be differentiated for only one targeted customers. That is, perfume for students and actors should not be the same. Unfortunately, for many products, a business would have to offer the same product for different segments.
The idea to have a different marketing program for different segment is related to the story of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the beginning. Are you willing to spend great effort preparing for long detailed contract for Steve Jobs? It is such a waste! It is the same why marketers should not spend a lot of money allocated to provide more information about a product to customers who just do not care about it very much.
Now since we know “Successful brand such as Nike, Starbucks, and Sony command a price premium and elicit much loyalty” (Kotler 274) and “Marketers and researchers use various perspectives to study brand equity. The premise of customer-based brand equity models is that the power of a brand lies in what customers have seen, read, heard, learned, thought, and felt about the brand over time.” (276), how can we set the successful marketing strategies to build strong brand equity? Once we understand that a customer segment is highly involved, we should spend extra time and effort to design a creatively much informing advertising and promotion. Advertising generally is important for high involvement customers since it provides information both rationally and emotionally. High involvement customers would rather like details more. They want to get the product knowledge so that it can make them sure in their pre-purchasing process.
Here is the illustration. My company is running a laptop business. I, as a marketer, use some outdoor advertising since I know that Jakarta is considered as a busy city. I know that I should design my advertising differently, but how? Assume I know the fact that college students are highly involved in computers product, and employees, on the other hand, are relatively low involved in the same product. Then in some areas in universities, I would design my advertisement with much information about the details of new processor, memory, entertainment features and much more; perhaps it is also best to add clear explanation and visual details in the advertising content. Yet in other places, for examples near large offices, I would use much simpler one, probably with emphasized only on a beautiful picture of the laptop and avoiding to put more details.
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There are some other ways however, to have a marketing program which is intended to low involvement customers. Direct selling, couponing, sponsorships are examples of a way to directly persuade customers in purchase decision rather informing them the superiority of the product over others. Last to say, although high customer involvement may lead to high brand equity, it is equally essential to think and plan on how to build equivalent brand equity for the low customer involvement.
