Solution Marketing

Solutions Marketing is defined as the process of creating, communicating and delivering a combination of products and services that address a customers’ key business problem. These integrated product and services offerings are usually marketed and sold in a Business-to-Business (B2B) environment, and require marketing methods and techniques that are typically used to market complex, sophisticated services.
Definition of Solution
The term “solution” is commonplace and has many different applications and interpretations. Examples of solutions definitions include:
* “The process by which a gas, liquid, or solid is dispersed homogeneously in a gas, liquid, or solid without chemical change.”
* “Something that is used or done to deal with and end a problem : something that solves a problem”
* “A method or process of dealing with a problem”
When used in the context of a B2B environment, however, the term solutions is used in a different context. A definition that was created by a council of leading technology companies in the early 2000s is "A combination of products and/or services with intellectual capital, focused on a particular customer problem and driving measurable business value." Since the definition was initially established, it has been applied and adapted by a wide range of product and services companies, including: "a combination of products, services, and intellectual property focused on a specific business problem that drives measurable business value. The solutions components can be from either vendor and one or more partners, and the solutions implementer can be the vendor, the partner, the customer itself, or a combination of the three."
Regardless of the specific definition, the main objectives for creating and marketing a B2B solution are:
* Address one or more specific customer problem.
* Integrate all of the products and services needed to address and resolve the problem; this typically requires partnering with other companies
* Provide tangible and/or intangible value that can be measured
Important Elements of Solutions Marketing
No matter it is B2C, B2B, or B2E (employee) solution have the important elements of, Customer and their pain points, Users, Process, Data and Content, Technology, Services Based on the definition of a B2B solution, the critical elements of solutions marketing are as follow:
* A greater emphasis on “pull” vs. “push” marketing
* The ability to create highly customer-centric and create offerings that address the specific problems and needs of a customer, or customer set
* The ability to create and deliver unified marketing initiatives that cut across internal Business Units as well as include one or more external business partners
* A value-based marketing approach - identifying, creating and delivering the value required by the customer, and being able to measure the value received
A company’s solution strategy, which is typically led and facilitated by Marketing, addresses a range of issues including:
* The organizational reach of the solutions activity - Product and services-based companies need to decide the extent that they want to become a solutions companies. Some of the strategic options include:
*# Create a new solutions Business Unit and limit the activities to this unit.
*# Have all of the Business Units split their focus between their traditional product/services and solutions
*# Have all of the Business Units become entirely solutions-focused
* The level of standardization vs. customization of the solution(s) - Some solutions address unique customer problems and are highly customized and have value to one or few companies; other solutions can have value to a much greater number of customers, allowing for many of the elements of the offer to be standardized.
* The corporate brand - Companies need to make a strategic decision on how much they want their solutions strategy to impact the brand.
* Scope - Decisions need to be made regarding how many different assets and resources across the company are required to contribute to the solutions offerings.
* Sales Enablement - Selling the solution is using the inbound techniques to attract customer with our offering value, and the sales need to understand the customer problem and able the provide quantitative and operational value to the customer specific business issue.
* Performance analysis - Measure the customer perceived value to evaluate the performance gap of our solution offering.
The Evolutions of Solutions Marketing
In early years, a business offer usually is refer to as product or service, and the marketing mix is refer to as 4P, Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Over the last 50 years, alone with the invention of World Wide Web (www), the market become global and the business has shift to a competition in the virtual technology world, and social media take a big role in the marketing strategy. More and more business started offering "Solutions" rather than just product or service in order to satisfied their customer need and solve their business issue.
Marketing Mix for Solution
We can still use 4P, Product, Price, Place, and Promotion for the traditional tangible product. However, for service and solutions the appropriate marketing mix should be different from the product marketing mix, for solutions marketing mix we could adapt to OVER model, which refers to Offer, Value, Experience, and Relationship.
An Offer is the combination of products and services. When designing a offer, above from the product that we provide to the customer, a solution marketer also have to design an innovation service that matches the customer need. To design a innovative service considering using the service blueprint, that maps out the interaction with customer the backstage support, which can easily understand the whole offer creation process.
Companies have to differentiate the solution offer in order to build the competitive advantage. The designing of differentiate solution offer starts from identifying all potential differentiators. Secondly, articulate each potential differentiator's real value and benefits, then compare your company's potential differentiators to those of competitors. Building a differentiator grid showing competitive strength and customer importance, and assess customer perceived value of each potential differentiator. Last but not least, align marketing and sales investment around customer's key perceptions.
The Value is the customer perceived value, which can be used as value based pricing.
The Experience is the value chain where customer learn,access and apply the offer.
The Relationship is how a company engaged and retain the customer and increase the customer lifetime value (CLV).
The Difference Between Solution Marketing and Product Marketing
# Solutions marketing requires the cooperation between cross-functional team in a larger scale then product marketing.
# The complexity of building a solution for a specific customer requires a deeper level of research and analysis on the customer specific business need.
# Solutions marketer is a cross-functional professional that possess the knowledge in a broader view.

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