Mit Case - Compexity of Identity

“The Complexity of Identity”

1) What is identity marketing, and what how is it superior to demographic or psychographic segmentation and targeting?

• Identity marketing, which recognizes the complex process of how customers become strongly attracted to the brands and products that help them to express who they are.

• Identity marketing is better than demographic or psychographic segmentation. The potential identities that people possess are numerous and fluid varies over an individual’s lifetime and across situations. For example, in a work setting, a person’s professional identity might be dominant among others. Later, at home, his/her identity as a parent might move forefront. And on weekends, his/her identity as an outdoor enthusiast could take precedent. These identities cannot be captured by psychographic segmentation ignores this complexity of individual’s identity or behavior differs from the situation they come across.

2) The authors suggest that some common marketing mistakes can be traced back to a misunderstanding of customer identity. What are they? Discuss with examples from the article.

There were 6 common mistakes related to the misunderstanding of customer identity.

Mistake 1) Selling new products solely on their features

Traditional approach is to draw people’s attention to tangible features and to prompt to customers to make decisions on the basis of this information.

Example: PalmOne Inc.’s handheld devices were successfully positioned as essential accessories of young, mobile professionals.

Mistake 2) Failing to solidify first-mover advantage

Companies often rush to market to be the first with a new product or service. But then they fail to solidify that advantage by forgetting to link their brand to customers’ identities

Research suggests that an early identity based judgment is “sticky”, that is, strongly resistant to counterarguments. Not only products have first-mover advantage, the perspectives they tap into through identity marketing also have that benefit.

Example: Laboratory experiment. Consumers were asked to consider the issue of pollution from the perspective of a businessperson. Then they were told to consider the opposite viewpoint from an environmentalist’s viewpoint. Result: People stick with their initial attitude despite the efforts to reverse them.

Mistake 3) Fighting the competition head-on

One of the advantages of identity-based marketing is the recognition that consumers are complex, with numerous identities that define who they are. This complexity provides many ways to position products in order to counter the identity marketing of competitors.

One particularly effective strategy is to avoid head-on attacks and instead promote alternative attractive identities for customers.

Example: Antismoking campaign which concentrated on health and addiction risk of cigarettes. The consensus is that such appeals are generally ineffective, especially to teenagers. Result: Imagery of smokers are cool rebels.

Mistake 4) Sticking with what’s worked before

The important point is that companies need to evolve their identity marketing instead of sticking