Whether for mission or for profit, companies and organizations often seek to shift customers from existing alternatives to a better choice. This project based course applies foundations of marketing and strategy to develop a plan for measurable change in market outcomes. It begins by considering objectives, then analyzing customers to develop a proposal that includes a vision, development roadmap and growth model. While various marketing vehicles may help achieve growth, we emphasize strategic relationships to move beyond the marginal growth of converting one customer at a time.
Types of Change
When we think of positive social change, we often think of missions such as sustainability, but Apple's Think Different campaign illustrates many ways the world can move forward, including through products as Apple did by restoring respect for music copyright and the iPod introduction during this specific campaign as well as Apple's digital device and services ecosystem that followed.
Like the brand and aspirations Jobs used to differentiate and elevate Apple and their talent, Stanford GSB's mission to Change Lives, Change Organizations and Change the World differentiates and elevates us. Students embracing that mission are "crazy enough to think they can change the world." It entails a shift in perspective beyond personally "making it" to realizing you can also move the world forward.
A Process
Step 1: What alternatives are currently being chosen?
For mission driven initiatives such as sustainability, there is commonly a focal "anti-social" alternative the prosocial would like people to move away from. There are also often existing pro-social alternatives that by revealed preference do not currently appeal to those engaged in the target behavior to change.
More broadly, profit driven firms may seek to shift behavior away from some existing alternatives to something better. For example, the iPhone and later iPad eventually captured behavior formerly engaged with laptops and print media such as magazines and newspapers to increase accessibility to content and information.
Step 2: What attributes explain why customers choose each existing alternative?
The existing alternatives customers sort into reveals determinants of their preferences, e.g. attributes they care more or less about. For each existing alternative from Step 1, we try to articulate what rationalizes that choice relative to the other alternatives.
Step 3: Which alternative can we shift customers away from to best further our vision for change?
In the mission driven context this might be the current alternative working most against the objectives of the mission. But more broadly in marketing, it is the alternative that our path toward change can best embark from. It typically includes an alternative whose primary attributes we can match, yet also offer novel benefits that guide customers toward better choices for them and potentially the world.
Step 4: How will we enact change? New products/solutions, partnerships, incentives, or communications?
The first step toward positive change is assessing whether a better alternative already exists or whether one needs to be developed.
Once a viable alternative or solution exists, we need to determine how to position it (Step 5) and then how to grow its adoption (Step 6).
Step 5: Positioning and creating a vision
A positioning statement includes a clear articulation of the type of solution we are providing to the target customer, why our solution offers what is expected of the focal alternative (from Step 3) in addition to what our simply articulated value proposition is and why customers will believe it.
An effective way to create a vision for your project is to write its press release first. This practice has long been used by creatives in agencies to assess how compelling a concept would be before embarking on it, e.g. asking whether reporters would find it newsworthy. It begins with a headline motivating reading further. Then the parapgraph(s) of the release articulate what it is and include hypothetical quotes from customers, partners, members of the team and others. This can motivate internal and external stakeholders to devote effort to realizing the vision.
Step 6: How to navigate customers through the decision-making process (i.e. down the conversion funnel)
Navigating customers on the path to purchase is often viewed as an advertising function, but it involves much more than advertising and is highly determined by all of the preceeding steps. Much of our focus is business development to form strategic relationships that can both create value and growth.
Step 7: Monetization
Whether for mission or profits, any organization needs to consider how to capture some of the value they are creating to support intended efforts or obligations to maximize shareholder value.
Step 8: Impact and a model of growth for mission and/or profit
Whatever our path may be to move the world forward, we need a candid assessment of potential impact. Too often the mission is simply a "feel-good" aspect of the product. But can it really have meaningful impact? This involves two steps:
We must begin with expected impacts, but can we create an experimental design to measure a true causal impact?
While the impact may be valuable on a conversion by conversion basis, is there a scalable path to truly move metrics that can track the progress of the mission.
Step 9: Moving Forward
How do we move beyond vision to execution and a development roadmap? As an Amazon Scholar during Covid19, I was exposed to Amazon's PRFAQ which simply adds Frequently Asked Questions to the Press Release from Step 5. If written and organized effectively, the FAQs append the development roadmap to a living and evolving articulation of the vision in the press release. For example, if the change effort involves growing a solution through a strategic partnership (my favorite marketing vehicle), the FAQs can specify what each partner, team or individual is responsible for delivering.
Project Example(s)
The following example is an entirely complete project from conception to rollout, testing and evaluation. Class projects include an outline of each of the steps then progress within a set of of them. A typical project would generate a proposal to be followed through by collaborating parties.
