A fresh take on marketing

MANILA, Philippines - We need to defy convention to be successful in the highly competitive mall industry. I believe that the key lies in fully understanding your market.

While taking the helm of the Starmall Group is a new challenge, my extensive exposure in the group’s housing market gives me a unique competitive edge. We know the affordable market. We understand their wants and needs. Using strategic learnabilities from the housing experience, we apply these to strengthen the Starmall market position.

Even with this critical advantage, it is a corporate policy to keep abreast of industry changes and of course, market dynamics and understanding. There are, of course, several ways to find out and assess buyers’ needs. In Starmall, market research and reviews are standard tools we use to unearth buyers’ requirements while talking with your buyer everyday provides an informal source on a more direct and personal level.

But perhaps unexpectedly, we realized that developing a strategy to incorporate the needs of buyers does not rest fully with them. The key lies in discovering something that happens to them before they have this need. We all know fully well that a need for a product or service is preceded by a problem. A need without a problem often goes unmet.

Here is an example from my housing experience. Several years back, as our housing companies catering to the affordable market continue to experience rapid sales, we had been able to cope with the demand with our usual housing and subdivision designs. We get architectural design briefs and listen to presentations from various companies espousing a different look for our housing design.

Yet we didn’t change. We didn’t shift to these new designs. The pain of action (pesos and distraction) exceeded the benefits being offered (more attractive housing designs).

With the evolving profile of the affordable housing market changing the market’s buying behavior, we soon faced a problem. The standard housing designs no longer matched up with the emerging psychographic profile of the market. We’d always had a need, but now we had a problem.

The new found economic liberty of the Class C and D markets as underlined by the OFW phenomena completely changed the affordable housing industry. House designs must now express both the tangible and intangible aspirations of the home buyer. A house is not just a home: it is now a showcase of the buyer’s achievement. While the demand continues to expand, the market is in search for a particular product.

Thus we acted: Camella shifted to developing new house and subdivision designs, and as they say, the rest is history.

My brief corporate story explains that the problem encountered by the buyer — not their need — is the bifurcating point. We distilled these learnings into four steps to incorporate the buyer’s problem in developing a competitive marketing strategy for Starmall.

Begin with a working strategy. Ask yourselves: What will you sell? Who are your target markets? How do you intend to reach them? To summarize, the answer to these questions forms the backbone of your product, market and channel strategies.

Second, evaluate the problems besetting this strategy. Determine the possible problems your buyers will face. Be critical of your product: what problems can your product address? What can your product solve?

Third, enumerate the problems and thoroughly analyze each, with the objective of determining which will give you the “best” rewards and which your product is best positioned to address. Based on this analysis, identify the one problem that highlights your strategy.

Lastly, choose the right buyer problem and let it guide your future strategy.

At Starmall, we know that there are two major benefits that every customer seeks out of shopping in a mall. First is the total experience and the second is the availability of a whole variety of goods “needed” by the market under one roof. These two expectations are satisfactorily met by both the mall developer and our roster of retailers. Our roles are clearly defined and each has developed our respective core competencies: we continue to work out business plans focusing on enhancing the overall experience, and our retailers concentrate on delivering the congruent set of merchandise.

So what started as: What do you want to sell? To whom do you intend to sell? How will you reach them? Became: What best solves the problem? Who is most affected by the problem? Who best can help buyers accept this problem?

So who says housing and mall operations are two different animals? I did. But because I knew my market and ventured to understand them more, I met my challenge successfully.