One Slice Marketing

Our neighborhood photo studio seems to be always crowded. Even in this age of digital photography. I went there for some lamination work; while I was waiting, two young people walked in. One of them wanted a passport-size photo for some job application.
‘Sure, sir,’ the studio staff showed a sheet on the wall, ‘Which package do you want?’

They looked at the sheet. It announced various packages for passport-size photo prints, the cheapest of them was ‘12 prints for 70 rupees.’ ‘But, I just want one print.’ ‘I understand, Sir, but we can’t make a single print. The special sheet can print a minimum of 12 photos in one go. So you need to buy at least 12 prints,’ the staff explained, ‘maybe you can use it for other applications?’ ‘I am not sure. I can use 3 or 4, maybe. All other prints will be wasted for sure. Can you please give me just 6 prints for 35 Rupees?’ ‘Sorry sir, in that case, I will have to use only half of the expensive printing sheet, wasting the other half.’

Those two friends were disappointed. They were discussing if they should spend extra and go for twelve prints knowing very well that most of them would be wasted. They even debated if they should search their room for some older pictures.’ At this point, the studio person intervened and suggested, ‘Sir, I will change the same package slightly. I will click both of your pictures and give 6 prints each. That way, you can just pay 35 rupees each and make the best use of your prints; I also won’t be wasting half of the printing paper.’

‘Excellent!’ Both of them readily agreed and went ahead with the click. I could see that they really appreciated the studio person understanding their pain points and creating a customized package.

It may sound like a sudden thought that flashed in that studio staff’s brain. But in reality, he might have thought of such creative, unusual packages to handle unique scenarios. He just targeted the right customized product to the right customer.

This is a very simple and effective example of one-slice marketing. It means targeting a very slim market: one customer!

Previous-generation marketing focused on a group of customers with similar characteristics. This aligned very well with the standard products and services. But this won’t be very effective today, where each customer is different. Each one wants to customize the product their way, as we discussed in the previous part of this article.

What if you save them time and energy in customization? Why not pre-customize your product as per the customer’s unique needs and surprise them? This will automatically increase your chances of winning that customer!

But this can only be done by knowing more about your customer, their likes, dislikes, pain points, what excites them, and more… In short, understand them well.

This is called enriching your customer database. We will discuss it in the next part of this article.

Naga Chokkanathan
Senior Director, CRMIT Solutions

About CRMIT Solutions
CRMIT Solutions is a pioneer in delivering software as a service-based customer experience (CX) consulting and solutions. With more than 200+ certified customer relationship management (CRM) consultants and more than 175+ successful CRM deployments globally, CRMIT Solutions offers a range of CRM++ applications for accelerated deployments, including various rapid implementation and migration utilities for Oracle® Sales Cloud (including Oracle CRM On Demand, Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management, and Oracle Eloqua solutions), Oracle® Social Cloud, and Oracle® RightNow Cloud Service. For more information about CRMIT Solutions, visit www.crmit.com.

About CRM++
CRM++ is a suite of native customer experience (CX) solutions by CRMIT Solutions for Oracle® Sales Cloud (including Oracle CRM On Demand, Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management, and Oracle Eloqua solutions), Oracle® Social Cloud, and Oracle® RightNow Cloud Service. With over 3000+ users, the CRM++ framework helps extend the customer experience (CX), and the power of customer relations management (CRM) features, including Email Work Bench, Self Service Portal, Mobile CRM, Social CRM, and Computer Telephony Integration.