Intellect Marketing

For years marketers have talked about marketing strategies, marketing mix, 4 P’s, 4R’s, 4C’s and 4A’s of marketing. Sound familiar? This has become the basic marketing checklist. It is a time to add extraordinary important “I” to the list: Intellect.  Customers do not buy products, they buy benefits, is a well known fact and has become mandatory for every marketer to market it’s products by communicating the benefits of his product to consumer. When all the products offer same stuff to its target market it becomes boring for consumers to make a choice, as there is hardly anything different. Only difference is the name and the logo. Marketers start differentiating their products by offering price discounts, various loyalty programs to compete in a market, where there is hardly any differentiation when it comes to real functional benefits.  These tried and tested strategies definitely work but to be exceptionally good or remarkable you need to have really different approach while marketing a product and be excellent. And that means you have to be a leader. You can't be remarkable by following someone else who's remarkable. One way to figure out this is to look at what's working in the real world and determine what the successes have in common.  What could the Nokia (bringing out new hardware every 30 days), 3M, Gillette possible have in common? Other than the fact that these companies have done exceptionally well and maintained its leadership for years, they have not only marketed their product but intelligence that customers buy with the product to solve their problem.  Today, the one sure way to fail is to be boring. Your one chance for success is to be remarkable.

Post – it is a piece of stationery with a re-adherable strip of adhesive on the back, designed for temporarily attaching notes to documents and to other surfaces: walls, desks and table-tops. Post-it is not just a bookmark for consumer; it is also bookmarking intelligently without having a mark of glue on the book or any surface. Gillette product makes it a point that the product give and edge to consumer to do things intelligently whether it is razor or a battery. Nokia combines Radio, Torch and mobility in a bundle and markets its’ product and makes sure that consumer finds it easy to use the instrument. Xerox is not just a photocopier machine but time saver and epitomizes smart way of doing things. Airtel Cellular service provider does not only make subscriber mobile but also tell them how to make use of technology intelligently. Airtel subscriber can use the smart way of paying their bill using easy bill pay services. It is all about giving easier solutions and smart way of doing things using your product or services.

I recently came across one such intelligence marketing. An Elevator company Schindler Elevators Corporation.  Elevators aren't a typical consumer product.  They generally get installed when a building is first constructed, and they're not much use unless the building is more than three or four stories tall.

How, then, does an elevator company compete? Until recently, selling involved dinners and long-term relationships with key purchasing agents at major real-estate developers. No doubt that continues, but Schindler Elevator Corporation has radically changed the game by developing a remarkable product. The story goes like this.

Every elevator ride is basically a local one. The elevator stops 5, 10, 15 times on the way to floor. This is a hassle for every one, but it's a huge, expensive problem for the building. While the elevator is busy stopping at every floor, the folks in the lobby are getting more and more frustrated. The building needs more elevators, but there's no money to buy them and no room to put them. An intelligent solution, this problem by Schindler Elevators Corporation.

Schindler's insight? When you approach the elevators, you key in your floor on a centralized control panel. In return, the panel tells you which elevator is going to take you to your floor. With this simple preset, Schindler Elevator Corporation has managed to turn every elevator into an express. The elevator takes folks immediately to the 12th floor and races back to the lobby. This means that buildings can be taller, they need fewer elevators for a given density of people, the wait is shorter, and the building can use precious space for people rather than for elevators. A huge win, implemented at a remarkably low cost.