Marketing: the Models, Cases and Frameworks, Explained One at a Time

Segmentation, brand measurement and buying-behaviour models, with the cases they are taught through.

What this section covers

Marketing splits into three questions here, and keeping them apart is most of what the entries are for.

What are we offering, and to whom? — segmentation, positioning, the marketing mix. What is the brand worth, and why? — brand equity and the models that decompose it. How does the buyer actually decide? — the decision-making unit, pricing psychology, the relationship spectrum.

How the entries relate

The 7P framework is the working structure for the first question, and the Tesco entry is the same framework applied to a business complex enough to show where the elements pull against each other. Both are written to end at the trade-off rather than at the seventh heading, because a mix analysis that lists seven elements and stops has done the preparation and not the work.

Aaker's brand equity model answers the second question by breaking a single word — equity — into components that can each be measured and each be managed. It is the entry to read before any discussion of brand value, because most arguments about brands are really arguments about which component is meant.

The buying-behaviour entries answer the third. The decision-making unit matters wherever the buyer is an organisation instead of a person, which is most business-to-business selling. Odd-even pricing and the psychological pricing family work on how a number is read and not on what it costs to supply.

Where to start

For the mix, read the 7P framework and then the applied Tesco entry. The framework alone tends to be memorised; the applied version shows what a real analysis looks for.

For anything about brands, start with Aaker. For pricing, start with the odd-even entry, which places the tactic in its family and says when the round number is the better choice — the half of the topic most answers omit.

One recurring correction

Several of these frameworks are written from the seller's point of view, and the strongest versions of each are the ones that notice it.

The mix lists things the organisation does. The buyer's experience — cost, convenience, communication — appears only by implication. That is not a reason to discard the framework, which remains the most usable checklist available, but it is the reason an analysis anchored to a named segment and a stated position beats one that works through the elements in order.

Where the section's boundaries sit

Two neighbours are close enough to cause confusion and are filed elsewhere.

Consumer research is a marketing question answered with research methods, and it sits under research methods because what ruins such a project is methodological: a leading question, a self-selected sample, a design that cannot support the causal claim being made of it. The marketing judgement — what to ask about, and what to do with the answer — is the easy half.

Pricing as a financial decision is a different subject from pricing as a perception. Margin, contribution and the appraisal of a price change belong in accounting and finance; how a number is read belongs here. A question that gives you a cost base is asking the first; one that gives you a competitor's shelf price and a customer segment is asking the second.

What the entries assume you already have

Every framework here operates on a chosen segment and a stated position, and neither is supplied by the framework. Segmentation decides who is being served; positioning decides what the offering means to them relative to the alternatives. The mix, the pricing and the brand work are all expressions of those two decisions.

That is why an analysis that opens by naming its segment and its position reads as an argument, and one that works through seven headings without naming either reads as a form being filled in.