With an understanding of consumer demand and its patterns, we realize how important it is for marketers to continually understand and incorporate consumer demand to service them in the most productive manner. Although product improvements based on feedback are a historical given, there is a whole new wave of demand-led product development which aims at drawing inferences from the nature of demand emerging across multiple channels and platforms and making them as a starting point for inputs related to the product development process.
Marketers have traditionally relied on superior product attributes, thoughtful communication, advertising, and other public relations platforms to create a demand for their product. The typical feedback they gathered from multiple channels post sale was limited to the number of stock keeping units (SKUs) sold in a region or territory, which was the singular indicator to know which kind of products a particular population liked and which specific variants were bought more. What this approach lacked was a kind of qualitative indicator which could help marketers know about the following details:
- The kind of experience people had
- How they went about searching for the product
- Which features in their view differentiated the products from competition
- The nature of demand behind the purchase: was it for a specific occasion; was there a context to the purchase; what kind of specific keywords a customer used while searching for the product; what was the scale of customer satisfaction post purchase; and so on
A lot of these questions, though may have been touched upon or gathered through offline responses, customer surveys, salesperson feedback, and focus groups, there never existed a structured way to get such responses and insights in the traditional world. The online world with technology by its side, opened up multiple ways to not just gather split-second responses but also provide a mechanism to store them for future analysis to build demand-led marketing strategies.
The biggest example of this was the proliferation of search technologies wherein consumers for the first time had an option to write plain text in a searchbox indicating his/her need or in economic terms putting up a very specific demand for marketers to cater to. This was the start of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as one of the most prominent digital marketing tools (which we will cover in greater depth in the later chapters). SEM with its advanced algorithms was able to match a consumer’s intent and match it to a marketer’s product to create an instantaneous- demand-driven fulfillment process which had never been envisioned before.
To understand this search demand driven marketing, we would need to briefly introduce the concept of keyword which forms the core of this most successful form of digital marketing. Keywords in digital marketing terminology are “words or phrases typed in a search engine by potential consumers which showcase their intent and a corresponding demand signal for any marketer”. The way keywords are written, their sequencing and structural composition with the use of semantic algorithms and tools, gives marketers lots of insights to comprehend and reason out whether a particular product is being demanded by the consumer and whether it makes sense to market a particular product based on that query.
It is believed that Yahoo! first made available targeted keyword advertising to its customers. In 1996, Chip Royce , head of online marketing for InterZine Productions of Boca Raton, Florida, approached Yahoo!’s sales agent (Flycast Communications) suggesting ads around keyword results to provide a more effective, targeted advertising within Yahoo!’s search results. Yahoo! obliged placing targeted ad banners when the keyword “Golf” was searched by Yahoo! users. Yahoo! later turned this opportunity into a formal marketing program for its entire customer base and promoted this in a July 1996 article in the Internet World magazine.
The example of journal publishing (showcased at length in Chapter 2) is a good example of how consumer demand and intent can be determined much more accurately in the online world and how marketers can analyze the aggregate of these cues to develop products on which consumers are more willing to spend, thus impacting the whole product development process itself. With multiple keyword analysis techniques like keyword occurrence analysis, seasonality and usage statistic, topic-based relationships and other qualitative and quantitative techniques, marketers now have real-time tools to judge demand patterns even at a daily or hourly level.
For creating scholarly articles (as already shared in Chapter 2, section titled “Digital Marketing Models Creation”), a journal publisher today has the wherewithal to access the entire keyword set which their target consumer (student community) would have typed or queried and with the help of a keyword planner, can easily classify demand for a specific type of content to develop multiple pricing models based upon the more sought after keywords and related content.
This search/intent-based model is just one of the examples of how marketers can gauge demand through online channels to model and market their products accordingly. The other ways in which marketers can gain substantial insights on consumer demand include consumer feedback through comments, social media mentions, product purchase analysis, Facebook page likes, etc. Marketers are applying multiple demand analysis techniques to the data gathered through these online consumer interactions:
- Consumer feedback/comments: One of the more relied ways in which consumer comments across various websites, e-commerce forums, review sites, blogs, etc., is collated and consumer sentiment towards a particular product is analyzed.
- Social media mentions: Community development tools are becoming crucial to gauge trending factors which influence communities as a whole rather than just individuals. For example, analyzing Twitter mentions are becoming crucial for brands to gauge whether their products are in demand (being conversed) or falling out of favour.
- Product purchase analysis: With large amounts of historic product purchase data trends available through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) shared by top online merchants, it has become important to keep a tab on the purchase analysis for specific regions and markets.
- Facebook page likes: We are taking a specific example of Facebook (the top social networking site in the world) which has become the barometer for brands to test their followership and not only get reactions from them on new product launches, but also involve them in new product creation. These days through crowd sourcing (gathering thoughts from a large crowd for business applications), new ideas can be developed and tested with top influencers (top 2 per cent of the intended audience) to forecast future demand and potential acceptance of new.
The example mentioned earlier shows the wide extent of data available to online marketers to gauge demand in a much more scientific fashion and apply elements of this knowledge gathered to various aspects of product development, be it, product research, feature creation, pricing, marketing, and online/offline fulfillment. We would look at multiple examples in the next set of chapters on how consumer insights, if researched well, can be really crucial, particularly for the success of newly launched products.
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