The Four Horsemen of Marketing.

March 10, 2006 on 2:40 pm | In Business, Musings by Josh Jones |

Run for your lives! Aieeeeeeee!

“Visibility, Quality, Fashion, and Price”

I’m not sure why I’m calling this the four horsemen of marketing. Apart from the fact it lent itself to making a silly picture. Which is not really a good reason.

You see, this article is not about horsemen at all, but rather the four critical ingredients to any companies marketing efforts. And those horsemen you see above (Apple, Coke, Honda, and Wal-mart) were chosen not only for the relative roundness of their logos, but because each of them has focused on a different ingredient.

That’s not to say any of them ignored the other three!

When it comes time to make a purchasing decision, customers will always pick the solution that provides the greatest personal value they can afford. In determining this value, all four elements will come into play, each weighing varying amounts based on the specific product and the specific customer. Of course, each of the critical ingredients is just that… critical. If any one of the four is below a mystical level in your customer’s head, your total value has just dropped to ZILCH, and there will be NO SALE.

All four must receive at least passing grades for your company to survive… but in your customers minds you will only ever be associated with one. So let’s break em down:

Such language!

Visibility: To the layman, (Required legal disclaimer: I have no training in marketing!) the goal of marketing IS visibility, period. Actually, marketing is a lot more than that.. marketing is everything your company does to make your product or service something a customer would actually decide to buy. Visibility is of course critical to this. It doesn’t matter how shiny your surf wax is, if nobody knows it exists, nobody can decide to buy it.

If your company decides to focus on visibility above all else, you’re going the Coca-cola route. You’ll spend a lot of money on advertising, FOREVER, and your brand will be eminently recognizable. What that brand actually represents in people’s minds may not be clear, but hey, at least it’s in their mindsl! And that’s a huge part of the equation.

Such language!

Quality: It’s not just an engineering problem. If your product does not meet some minimum standard of quality (reliability, ease-of-use, functionality, etc..) for whatever it is your customers expect it to do, no amount of the other three horsemen can save it. You may flounder around for years, keeping your head above water as your Public Relations team hates their lives, until you inevitably beg God herself for the sweet release of bankruptcy.

Now, if your brand is synonymous with quality, you’re most likely a niche player. Because honestly, really high quality is generally not worth the price to the mass market. But don’t worry, you don’t need perfect quality to survive.. you just need enough quality. (See Microsoft.) Honda is an example of a company that is all about quality, and they’ve done well because they’re in a market where customers believe quality is important (or else they die)!

Such language!

Fashion: Really, fashion shouldn’t be a “critical” ingredient in that spicy Italian meatball that is marketing. And if your customers are robots or Vulcans, it isn’t.

If not, it is. It doesn’t matter how cheap, great, and well-known your product is.. if nobody would be caught dead using it, you’re better off selling matches in a volcano. To the devil. During a heat wave. In Nevada. In August.

Fashion is intriguing though. In some markets, it is the least important aspect (though still necessary!), but in others, it is the very sword you will live or die by! If your company is known above all else as fashionable, you will be able to command a higher price than others of a similar quality and visibility. Which leads to great profits… because fashion, as elusive as it is to attain, once attained, is a relatively inexpensive quality to maintain!

Apple has done a great job in the last few years of making their consumer electronics products not only of a passable quality and price, but also of intense fashion appeal, which has done wonders for their stock! The scary thing about relying on fashion is it’s so ephemeral.

Today’s iPod is tomorrows Member’s Only jackets and baggy pants.

Such language!

Price: No big tricks here.. if your stuff is too expensive, nobody will buy it. Of course, price is not value! $30,000 for a Ferrari is a better value than $25,000 for a Fiat. You see, by working on the other three ingredients, you can raise the level where the price for your product passes that invisible “no longer worth it” boundary for your market.

If your company decides to compete on price above all else, the conventional wisdom is, you’re screwed! Pick something else! No companies ever make it big competing on price! Nobody like say McDonalds, Wal-Mart, or Southwest Airlines.

Oh, I’m sorry, was that too much IRONY?

It’s true, competing on price is probably the hardest ingredient to compete on. As companies get bigger, it’s easier to offer cheaper and cheaper prices.. and the odds are, if you’re reading this, you’re not a very big company. However, the rewards are also the greatest. You see, most people are poor (Or at least cheap bastards.)

And as I said before, people decide on the GREATEST PERSONAL VALUE THEY CAN AFFORD. So even if you’re not offering that great a value, if your price is low, you’ve opened yourself up to a whole puck-load of people who just can’t afford anything better.

And if your overall value isn’t actually that great, it probably means you’re able to make a pretty healthy profit out of each sale. And since there are soooo many cheap customers in the world, you’ll probably make a lot of sales. You might be universally reviled for your junky products and cut-throat business practices, but you’re universally reviled all the way to the bank.

An exercise for the reader!

So really, every brand out there has some combination of Visibility, Quality, Fashion, and Price that makes them tick. Here are how various brands strike me personally… feel free to discuss and add your own in the comments area (especially your thoughts on DreamHost!

Coke: Visibility, then Fashion, then Price, then Quality.
Honda: Quality, Price, Fashion, Promotion.
Apple: Fashion, Quality, Visibility, Price.
Wal-Mart: Price, Quality, Visibility, Fashion.

DreamHost: Visibility, Quality, Price, Fashion..?

And that’s the way we like it!

13 Responses to “The Four Horsemen of Marketing.”

  1. H.S. Kinn Says:
    March 11th, 2006 at 5:11 am

    Hmm. For Dreamhost I tend to think of it in terms of Quality, Price, and then Visibility. I picked you guys to host Aphrodite’s Apples’ website because you are the host for eCauldron, a Pagan site, which meant to me that you are adamant supporters of free speech, which is necessary for an endeavor like ePublishing. Quality continues to stick, because over the months that we’ve worked with you, we’ve needed very little service, but what we have had has been excellent. The word of mouth I have given other webmasters on you guys is, “reasonable price, excellent service.”

  2. Joe Grossberg Says:
    March 11th, 2006 at 3:57 pm

    DreamHost: Price, Visibility, then Fashion and then Quality as a distant fourth.

    My experience greatly differs from H.S. Kinn’s.

    I’ve found Dreamhost to be a bargain; there’s no question about that.

    Also visibility (i.e. how many people mention DH as an affordable hosting solution) is also high.

    Fashion is decent, insofar as you add things (Subversion, Rails, WP 2.0) not long after I start looking for them. I still wouldn’t mind PostgreSQL though.

    Quality, though, has just been awful. I can’t emphasize this enough. It used to be good, but over the past month alone, I must have had a dozen occasions where I had to contact DH support about a full-fledged site outage.

    I mean, a good deal and great options doesn’t do me a lot of good when no one can see the site I’ve built.

    Site availability is not something to be treated lightly, which is why it seems almost all of DreamHost’s competitors have 99.9% uptime guarantees, a promise that would have cost DH a lot of money recently.

    God, I *wish* you guys treated quality as one of your top two focuses. That certainly hasn’t been my experience so far; precisely because of quality, I went looking around for an hosting alternative. If things hadn’t made their slight improvement (now I have to contact DH support “only” once or twice a week), I would have left.

  3. Simon Jessey Says:
    March 12th, 2006 at 5:27 am

    I’m sure that you are going to get many different answers here. My experience of the brands you have mentioned would cause me to classify/rank them in the following way:

    Coke: Visibility, Quality, Price, Fashion
    Honda: Reliability, Price, Quality, Fashion
    Apple: Fashion, Visibility, Quality, Price
    Wal-Mart: Price, Visibility, Quality, Fashion

    and the one you have been waiting for…

    DreamHost: Features, Price, Quality, Proactive

    For me, DreamHost is the perfect blend of features and value for money. The quality of the service has been better than any host I have previously used, but I wouldn’t say that you had much in the way of brand visibility. I like the fact that DreamHost is proactive - often deploying enhancements or improvements that I want before I’ve even had a chance to suggest them.

    Difficult to quantify is something I call the “DreamHost Feelgood Factor” - it comforts me that customers enjoy a reasonably high level of communication with the DreamHost team, and that spokespersons for DH are chatty, witty, and intelligent. Customers are made to feel part of a community, and the fact that they can make suggestions for features and then see them implemented enhances the DFF.

  4. James Higgins Says:
    March 12th, 2006 at 11:00 am

    “honestly, really high quality is generally not worth the price to the mass market. But don’t worry, you don’t need perfect quality to survive.. you just need enough quality.”

    Are you trying to make a statement here? Because DreamHost certainly does have sub-standard quality.

    Right now my web site is down. Well, technically it is “up” but every page it returns is empty. How nice, it must be great for server performance though.

    “All four must receive at least passing grades for your company to survive”

    I think DH needs to focus a lot more on Quality in the near future or, while you may survive, you’re going to start loosing customers rather than gaining them. I suggested someone use your site awhile back, now I’m sorry about that because your poor quality (downtime, performance, etc) is affecting their site.

    Very soon I’ll start doing e-commerce on my web site, and I’m truly concerned that DreamHost simply isn’t up to par to handle that. If my site goes down, I’ll loose money. I just started running a system to check my site every few minutes so I can fairly evaluate this. Unfortunately, it isn’t looking for “blank” pages, so right now that script thinks my site is up - while it is not. Another nail in the DH coffin.

    Seriously, DreamHost is doing well on most things other than quality. Why quality is so damn low, though, I don’t understand. I’ve done Internet system administration for ISPs, while it isn’t trivial providing good uptime isn’t exactly rocket science.

    Please, please, please improve your quality. I’ve heard complaints from several people I know who host using DH and we’re all actively seeking alternative hosting. I’d rather stay with DH, but unless quality makes a substantial improvement I simply can’t afford to.

  5. David Smith Says:
    March 12th, 2006 at 7:30 pm

    DreamHost 3 months ago: Price, Quality, Visibility, I don’t think Fashion comes into choosing a host.
    DreamHost Now: Price, Visibility, Quality,
    Dreamhost 3 months from now?: Hopefully Quality, Price, Visibilty.

    For me, price and quality were the biggest factors when I joined Dreamhost, of late though the quality has been slipping, I can only guess due to the latest plans which have created a great influx of customers causing an extra burden on the Dreamhost network, hopefully in the future Dreamhost can work on the “Quality” aspect in future.

  6. Syody Says:
    March 13th, 2006 at 10:12 am

    I was very disappointed to see the swearing and crude language in this article.
    I would expect a lot better from a company like DreamHost.
    As for myself, I think DreamHost has done a very nice job with features and quality. My site has never gone down and the features DreamHost adds is very nice.

    However, my respect for DreamHost dropped when I read this article. The formatting errors combined with the vulgar language bothered me quite a bit.
    I think this article would have been wonderful without the profanity.

  7. Phoinix Says:
    March 13th, 2006 at 1:30 pm

    We’re a fine art/design/craft studio that needs full up time on our site to make a living. Luckily we haven’t experienced any problems with our hosting. (Aside from a poorly scheduled LA power outage). Support is outstanding as is the value. Admittedly, if that were to change, I would lose my sense of humor rather quickly.

    DH: Price, Quality, Fashion, Visibility

    I didn’t see a noticeable amount of profanity or swearing…

  8. Joe Grossberg Says:
    March 13th, 2006 at 1:54 pm

    Giving Dreamhost Some Credit…

    Well, I appreciate them letting me (and others) air their grievances publicly. I’m impressed that they didn’t delete the negative……

  9. Nate Says:
    March 13th, 2006 at 2:30 pm

    Speaking of quality. When are you guys going to roll about a better webmail email client. I really like yahoo’s new mail thats in beta.
    -Nate

  10. Pete in Support Says:
    March 13th, 2006 at 7:22 pm

    I wanted to make sure that people like Nate know they have a voice: The suggestions section of your panel is where you can vote for what you think are the most important features for us to work on. We really do pay attention to it.. It really only takes a few hundred customers banging at the suggestions box to get an idea seriously looked at! I myself have wanted to see something better than squirrelmail, but it’s not as easy to replace as you might initially think due to some custom internal workings (such as the email address -> m1234567 mailbox mapping).

  11. Jameson Says:
    March 14th, 2006 at 9:16 am

    Josh, you crazy!

    Coke: Visibility, Quality, then Fashion, then Price.
    Honda: Quality, Price, Fashion, Promotion.
    Apple: Fashion, Quality, Visibility, Price.
    Wal-Mart: Price, Visibility, then Fashion, then Quality.

    Think of Kathie Lee. It’s about fashion and price. Lord knows it isn’t about quality. Wal-Mart’s message is basically. We’re cheap, we’re everywhere, and we’re cuter than K-Mart (though barely). Quality doesn’t come into it, and for their customers — it doesn’t matter.

    DreamHost: Price, Quality, Visibility, Fashion

    I found out about DreamHost based on the visibility (duh) — a lot of sites I visit started having “Hosted by Dreamhost” links. I signed on because of the price and fashion (i.e., the web panel offers the features I want, and the service includes “fashionable” things like Apache and MySQL, as opposed to unfashionable things like IIS and MS Access or somesuch gobbledeygook). I stayed because of the quality.

    And I am among those who believe the quality (or, better, reliability) has faltered somewhat in the last 3-6 months, but I don’t think the DreamHost blog is the place to make those declarations. Save it for the support forum, where it’s more appropriate — and more likely to generate a quick and useful response!

    I do think fashion can apply to a web host, for the reasons stated above and for other reasons like this blog and the monthly newsletter. These things show us that DreamHost values communication and transparency, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Plus, as Kinn says above, they value free speech! While hardly “in fashion” these days, that definitely scores DreamHost some style points!

  12. A.Phoenix Says:
    March 16th, 2006 at 11:27 am

    I would say my experience with DH runs something like this: (Price, Quality), (Fashion, Visibility)

    It’s hard for me to put price ahead of quality or vice versa; the same goes for fashion and visibility. I have been with a few hosts, and I have to say that Dreamhost is the best that I’ve come across. I fully acknowledge that there is occasional downtime, or slow periods, but I also recognize that, hey, it’s hard to do what Dreamhost is doing, especially at the prices DH offers. I admin a few servers for my (professional) work and it is hard to have a 99% uptime, especially when you have too many people with their fingers in the pot, as it were.

    I think that many DH customers don’t really think through the idea that DH needs to be up more. The thing I like about DH is the freedom that they give me in development. There’s a definite air of “Hey, if you need it, you can get it” at DH that other hosts don’t have. However, with these freedoms come problems - if someone runs a poorly coded python script, for example, they can take out a server. This somehow becomes DH’s fault. Or if there’s a power outage, or a massive attack on DH servers, people blame DH. My point of view is that DH is good enough to make sure that people know what’s happening when there is an outage and works to quickly resolve every problem I experience. I’ll say that again; every time I’ve had a problem, Dreamhost resolves it quickly.

    Before rushing to judge Dreamhost, or claiming *in their blog* that they suck, I invite you to try administering a server that has a hundred websites on it. See how far you get. See how many people break your server and then say that it’s your fault. Overall, try to come back and reassure those people that you’re doing everything you can and don’t cut those people off when they publicly claim that you’re doing a poor job.

    DH -> you guys are doing a great job. Keep it up.

  13. John Droste Says:
    April 23rd, 2006 at 10:37 pm

    I’d say quality is higher on the list for Coke and lower on the list for Walmart. Maybe they want you to think that Walmart is quality, but come on! Honestly, I don’t expect things from Walmart to last particularaly long. I’m not rich, but I’d rather spend an absolutley enormous amount of money on something, if I know it won’t fail. Why? High residual value, inherent quality, product utility time after time, and less worries. I’d rather work harder than wonder if my leather shoes will hold up, or if my car will get me home. Because they will. The customers who matter, meaning the ones who will pay, and the ones who will recommend your product, care about quality first and foremost. See, the problem that you didn’t address, is that good quality sets trends and it governs fashions. Your comparison between Fiat and Ferrari might even be totally irrelevant because it speaks nothing to the inherent quality of the product. Diesel jeans are fashionable because they’re well made. Steer clear of avante garde fashion, and you’re absolutely golden. Mainstays in fashion are somewhat timeless, and you can verify that with any expert if you’d like. Quality might be the most important factor and you can’t progress anywhere without it. It depends on the customer’s demands, so you can still make money with poor quality, but is that ethical?

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