Sunday, July 23, 2006

Lateral Marketing - Philip Kotler and Fernando Trias de Bes (2003)

A very simple yet very effective framework to bring in innovation in any marketing set up. The basic concepts is fairly simple choose one of the 4Ps and apply one or more of the following transformations:
  1. Substitute it
  2. Invert it
  3. Combine it
  4. exaggerate it
  5. Eliminate it
  6. Reorder it
A gap will be apparent due to these transformations. The idea is to create an offering which is relevant to the gap created. The difference between lateral and vertical marketing is, while lateral marketing emphasizes on creating gaps and filling it with new offerings, vertical marketing creates a segment where a gap may not be apparent and a segmentation can create a new range of offerings. An excellent example given is of a heavy consumer vs a normal consumer. The gap does not exist yet through vertical marketing concepts you will typically create an offering (bigger container) for a heavy consumer purely for targeting. Overall, as per the authors lateral markets create new markets while vertical markets create better segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP) thus grow markets. Both kinds of practices have their own advantages and one cannot be replaced for the other.

Unlike brainstorming where ideation is a team effort, lateral marketing concepts can be used by individuals and more over lateral marketing is far more focused as it's conceptually based on changing part of an existing paradigm. The book also suggests methodologies for storing unused ideas for later reference.

A must read for any marketing executive.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's a concise and good note on lateral marketing. I am not clear about one thing: Does lateral marketing play a role right from the product planning phase? Does it work to carve out "undiscovered but useful" customer needs to create space in the same segment and then define those features during the product planning?

On another note- Thank you for putting a link to my blog on your blog links!

Emm Gee said...

Very interesting.. thx again for the overview

Regards,
Mayank

Sambit Kumar Dash said...

Hi Bikram,

The answer to your question is none. From the marketing perspective it's the product that follows the market. So how can lateral market can be applied is fairly simple. See the red ocean and understand the use case and now create forced disconnects by transforming an activity or an actor or an attribute. And then see if something can be worked out that can fill the gap. This gap filling will lead to a blue ocean or a new market.

Lateral marketing cannot be part of product planning. Product planning from a marketing perspective starts with market segmenting, targeting and positioning (STP).

Please remove the misconceptions that product drive market it's alway market and wants that become needs and ask for a solution which the product serves.

Hi Emm Gee

Thanks for your review.

regards,

Sambit

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