The great Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, said,
"If you know the enemy and know yourself,
you need not fear the result of 100 battles.
If you know yourself but not the enemy,
for every victory you gain,
you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself,
you will succumb in every battle."
This is certainly true in marketing as well.
One of the first steps you must take before planning for
any marketing campaigns is a thorough self-assessment.
As any psychologists would tell you,
the question of who are you is perhaps
the most fundamental and also the most difficult question an individual person
would encounter during their lifetime.
The constant search of a self-identity is
a basic driving force behind almost all social and communication activities.
As humans, we initiate social contexts with
other people and develop relationships based on our perceptions of ourselves,
and we also learn about who we are and
validate our self-perceptions by interacting with others.
We see ourselves through the eyes of others.
Broadly speaking, we have two sets of self-identities,
one that is held by ourselves and one that is seen by others.
Psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, developed
the Johari Window to illustrate the complexity of
a person's self-perception and help people better
understand their relationship with themselves and others.
The Johari Window is formed by two crossing axis,
whether a person's trait is known by oneself, or not, and by others, or not.
In the original Johari Window exercise,
participants are asked to choose from a list of adjectives
reflecting the qualities that they feel describe their own personality.
The participants' peers then get the same list,
and each pick an equal number of adjectives that describe the participant.
These adjectives are then inserted into a 2-by-2 grid of
four window panes formed by the 2 crossing axis: open,
hidden, blind, and unknown.
The open window pane holds those characteristics and
qualities that are known and agreed upon by oneself and their peers.
In the hidden pain, holds those adjectives selected by oneself but not by any of their peers.
The blind spot or personal traits
not selected by oneself
but only by their peers.
The unknown windowpane represents people's behaviors or motives yet to be discovered.
Although the Johari Window is an analysis widely used in self-help in therapy situations,
it can also be a useful strategy for businesses to assess their product and brand images.
Let's look at Uber as an example, it's a company.
Uber's core product is its technology platform.
Much of the company's operational and research development efforts
are focused on the development,
maintenance, and expansion of its technical features and capabilities.
The company does not see itself as a taxi company,
and it sees Uber drivers as users of its technology instead of their employees.
However, this self-perception may not be shared by
Uber users, such as drivers and the passengers, or even the public in general.
Such a gap in self-perception has not only led to
a number of legal and regulatory problems for Uber,
but also presented significant challenges
to Uber's branding and public relations efforts.
Let's see another example.
In 2015, Airbnb launched an aggressive marketing campaign in
San Francisco to highlight its contribution to the city's financial health.
For example, one ad said, "Dear parking enforcement,
please use the $12 million in hotel taxes to feed all expired parking meters.
Love, Airbnb."
Although the company's original intention might have been to
express its self-identity of being
a disruptor of the old economic order and a champion of a new sharing economy,
the ad campaign appeared sarcastic and ignorant to the general public
and the creative strategy backfired.
A gap in self-perception could help explain this mistake.
Airbnb saw itself as a part of the cool startup culture.
It's a maverick and certainly not just another boring hotel company.
It believed that its technology platform was
a whole new way to think about traveling and lodging.
However, to the public and to the users,
Airbnb is just a convenient and economic way of booking rooms.
Most people think of Airbnb as an alternative to other hotel brands and do not see
it as a tech firm, besides
an accurate understanding of your own product or brand identity.
Another critical aspect of self-assessment is
determining your relative position in a given market.
How big is the overall market of your products or services?
How is your primary market related to other markets?
Who are your competitors?
What differentiates your products and brands from those offered by your competitors?
These are just some of the questions you should
ask when beginning a positioning analysis.
A thorough positioning analysis must consider
the fluidity and complexity of the concept of market position.
For example, in the ride-sharing app market,
Uber's direct competitor in the US is Lyft.
But globally, its largest competitor might be DiDi Chuxing,
a popular Chinese ride-sharing app that dominates the Chinese and South American markets.
In the broader market of personal transportation, however,
Uber's competitors also include taxi companies and car rental companies.
Beyond these 2 markets,
they're less obvious competitive spaces.
For example, in the financial and investment market,
Uber might be competing for the same pool of
investors who are interested in tech startups as a business category.
In this case, Uber will be mentioned together with Airbnb,
Grubhub, and other tech companies.
In addition to market positioning,
a thorough self-assessment should also include
an analysis of media presence and the visibility of your brand or products.
Do you have positive media coverage on your product and company?
Do I have a healthy following on social media?
Can consumers find you on various search engines and directories?
How many different ways can your products or brands be discovered?
Finally, in the age of digital marketing,
one important aspect of self-evaluation is an audit of your digital readiness.
Before launching a digital marketing campaign,
you must assess your capacity and readiness in four crucial areas: budget,
human capital, technology, and data.
How big is your marketing budget?
What portion of it are you willing to commit to digital?
Are you in a position to work with full service or specialized digital agencies?
Or would you rather manage your digital campaign in-house?
Are members of your marketing team familiar with
the various digital channels and new media technologies?
Do you have a devoted team for digital and social media management?
Do you have a well-developed website?
Is this website managed in-house or by a web hosting company?
How easy or difficult is it for you to update your web content?
Have you set up web analytics tools to help monitor the traffic to your web pages.
Do you have in-house expertise in areas such as digital content creation,
digital asset management, and data storage, analytics, and security?
What kinds of data do you keep and analyze?
Do you use a good CRM system to manage the customer and the sales lead database?
The more thoroughly you consider the various resources
required and available to you to support a successful digital campaign,
the better you can plan and manage it.
Let's quickly summarize some of the key points we touched upon in this lesson.
We started by asking a simple question, who are you?
A good response to this question must address the following: who do you think you are?
Who are you in the eyes of others?
Who do you want to be? And do you have what it takes to be what you want to be?
These decisions help you stick to
your business objectives while planning a marketing campaign,
better understand your relative market position and more effectively
allocate and utilize your financial human capital and technological resources.
Mike YaoAssociate Professor of Digital Media
