Jacques Lendrevie: Marketing is about seduction, but above all about creating value
21 February 2007
Read by 3065 persons
In the last 50 years, no major advance has been made on consumer psychology.
The market must be approached with mass means, segmented proposals, and sometimes personalized approaches.
Jacques Lendrevie Marketing expert and co-author of "Mercator"
Low cost will be the revolution of the coming years. But sectors that cannot reduce their offer to the essentials will not be able to implement it.
Published for the first time in 1974 on the initiative of Jacques Lendrevie, the work Mercator has become over time a reference in the field of marketing, used in both major business schools and the professional world. Published in several languages and sold to thousands of copies, the work is considered a counterpart of Marketing & Management by Kotler & Dubois, which has also inspired Mr. Lendrevie whom we interviewed on the fundamentals of marketing, its latest trends and its place in the organization. Light.
1. La Vie éco: Sold to several hundred thousand copies, "Mercator" is considered the Bible of marketing. What is the key to this success and what differentiates you from Kotler and Dubois?
Jacques Lendrevie: Kotler is a very good master of thought, and I am very admiring of his work. It was he who gave me the idea of creating Mercator in 1974. If I could say something philosophical, I would argue that Americans in general, Kotler in particular, have a slightly more scientific and normative vision than ourselves, that is to say that they believe more than we do in essential principles in marketing. We believe that each major principle is there to be challenged.
2. It is said that marketing does not create the need but the desire. Is this definition still valid?
It is still valid, but it is not essential. Marketing is fundamentally an operation of seduction, and even, to seduce, you must have a proposition. We have evolved in our definitions. We started from the first definitions which state that to conquer consumers, to seduce them, you must first know them. This is why marketing was first a marketing study. By knowing the consumer well, you will be better able to innovate and seduce him. This remains true, but the essential is different: marketing is about creating value. That is to say that if consumers choose my brand rather than another, it is because they have perceived an interesting value that they do not find in others and they are even ready to pay more.
3. Can you specify your reasoning?
We are talking about mutation and evolution of needs and not creation of needs. Marketing aims to channel the maximum number of consumers to a brand for a given need. Sometimes, there are great ideas, radical innovations, by which a new brand, a new product category, is created, but this is very rare. And these ideas do not come from the market or the consumer, they come from companies. Consumers do not have ideas, they vote and sanction.
4. What do you answer then to those who say that marketing is nothing but lies to sell at all costs?
People who think so have a poor opinion of the consumer and consider him to be susceptible to being influenced by anything. They have forgotten one essential thing: the consumer is becoming more and more intelligent and more and more informed.
Never underestimate your consumers, rule number 1. Second rule, never take them for more intelligent than they are. Third thing, manage with both.
There is not a major brand that has existed for 20 years and has always lied to the market. It may have lied, but in that case, the lie has become an accepted discourse. For example, advertising tells fairy tales, incredible things. Of course, they do not fundamentally reflect reality, but they are accepted as such. That being said, there are occasionally dishonest practices, but their authors have reason to worry because the consumer has means of retaliation that can hurt.
In short, we can be excessive in our words, caricature and pass the product under a good dose of humor to make it accepted, but we cannot go against the truth of the product, the truth of the brand, and the truth of the consumer.
5. How has the discipline evolved over the last 20 years?
Fundamentally, it is not on the 4Ps that things have changed. The 4Ps (product, promotion, price and placement) are not notions of marketing strategy; the strategy focuses on the major ideas on which these 4 Ps are organized.
Then, let us remember that marketing was based on three pillars of knowledge: psychology, sociology and statistics.
Psychology is the art of understanding the black box of each of us: the why of behavior; sociology is the understanding of the group phenomenon, and statistics are used to process all the data.
No progress has been made in the last 50 years on understanding the black box of individuals, and this is dramatic. Today, we do not understand why the consumer accepts or does not accept a brand.
A very strong trend has developed in the last 15 years, called behavioral marketing, which consists in observing the real behavior of the consumer from individual databases. However, we are not interested in why he acted, but in his emotional behaviors and his reactions to marketing actions. We then find ourselves with groups that have fairly similar reactions, that is to say microsegments. It is an individual analysis combined with criteria that allow us to make segmentations and predictions according to the degree of response, it is stimulus-response. This marketing assumes that we can gather a complete collection of data on the behavior of each of our consumers, and of course, that we know how to process them.
6. From there we arrived at one-to-one marketing...
Marketing was born from the opening of mass markets: these are the large consumer markets. It was originally based on market research by survey. Thus, it gave companies the economic possibility of understanding anonymous markets and restoring a representative vision of these markets.
From the knowledge we had of individuals, we built average profiles, we drew typical consumers. This led to mass communication and mass distribution. In a second step, we began to break up the mass market, hence segmented marketing. Subsequently, it was said that segments are only statistical illusions made up of different personalities; we then moved on to one-to-one marketing.
Similarly, I do not share the idea that we have moved from mass marketing to segmented marketing and then to one-to-one marketing. I say that one does not eliminate the other. Today, the reality and the difficulty of marketing policies mean that we must do all three at the same time. It is necessary to attack the market with mass means, have segmented proposals, and sometimes use personalized, one-to-one approaches. The real difficulty for each company is to know how to find the right balance.
7. So we cannot rely on a robot portrait of the consumer to build a strategy?
We must avoid making a robot portrait of the consumer. Today's consumer has more freedom of choice. We had the idea of building product ranges a bit like social security funds (there are the rich, the poor and between the two the middle class), hence the idea of the high end, the low end, and the mid-range. It's wrong! In France, it is not the poor who buy the Logan.
8. In the case you cite, the economic aspect is nevertheless highlighted. Is it not, as in air transport, a "low cost" marketing strategy?
Low prices are not linked to low quality. Low cost provides the essentials at a highly competitive price. The entire company is redesigned to offer very good quality on the essentials at low prices.
Tomorrow, the mid-range will be dead because it is too expensive compared to low cost and not attractive enough compared to high-end. Marketing will be to offer the consumer a clearer alternative between seduction, options, comfort and the essentials. These same consumers will buy low-cost products and so-called high-end products. Low cost will be the revolution of the coming years. But sectors that cannot reduce their offer to the essentials will not be able to implement it.
9. Considering today that marketing is essential to accompany this mutation, how should the function be positioned in relation to others?
The problem for the company is not to define the hierarchy but to make people work together. Marketing is not only the business of the marketing department. The wealth of the company is born from the wealth of the market. The company must be driven by the desire to stick to the market, by the conviction of creating value for consumers, which in turn will translate into the creation of economic value for it.
10. Does the marketing function necessarily have to integrate communication?
The function of marketing in an organization depends first on the nature of the sector, the economic evolution of the sector and the strategy of the company. Marketing only makes sense in a competitive space. It is a way to improve its competitive position.
Since the concern is to have coherent communication, it is more judicious to have a single management that centralizes and gives its approval to all forms of communication, including marketing communication, internal, financial or societal communication.
The separation only works in companies where there is no important marketing function. Otherwise, you cannot take away the communication budget from the marketing department, and the communications manager is not competent for communication to distributors or products. Communication is inherent in the marketing and life of a brand.
11. If you had to summarize marketing, what could you say?
Marketing is a state of mind. Out of humility, we must say that the consumer is always right because it is he who buys, it is he who votes or does not vote. We must always ask ourselves the question of whether we are not mistaken in interpreting the consumer's point of view.
Finally, marketing is above all a method, a positioning, a strategy and, above all, a daily practice. It is made up of 10% of major strategic ideas and 90% of good executions.
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