Marketing is not just ad spend and getting people to walk through your door (real or digital). Long-term, and market-leading, success comes from crafting the entire end-to-end experience for your customers. This may require you to think about your FI offerings like a product or service manager.
Gibson Biddle, former head of Product at Netflix, offers a framework for where to start thinking about your offerings and your overall strategy. Biddle distills his experience into the acronym DHM, short for Delight, Hard to copy, and Margin. Whether starting from scratch for a new product or looking for ways to improve existing offerings, Biddle proposes a series of questions for
How will the product delight customers?
Begin by thinking about not just your best customers but customers that love you. The customers that tell their friends about you and would really miss you if you went away. What do they like? How could you possibly make them even happier in the future?
What will make the product hard to copy?
Moats, sustainable advantage, Porter’s 5 Forces, all the ideas around staying relevant to your customers and not commodified. Biddle suggests applying the “7 Powers” from Hamilton Helmer (Brand, Network Effects, Economics of Scale, Counter-positioning, Unique technology, Switching costs, Process power, Captured resources)
How will you generate and maintain/grow margins in the product?
Customer satisfaction is a moving target over time. How will you fund the innovation needed to make your existing and new customers happy tomorrow?
While far from comprehensive, these questions are a good first start to formulating a coherent strategy. Thinking about this in the context of what sets you apart is key to not only finding an advantage but even protecting the position you hold today. To quote former Intel chief Andy Grove “Only the paranoid survive”.
