The Law of Sacrifice - Law #13 under the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
“You have to give up something order to get something”. There are 3 areas of sacrifice – The Product Line – The Target Market – Constant Change. Pick your poison carefully.
‘In order to get something, you have to give up something’ or in simple words one would call it the ‘Give and Take’ policy. This is one thing that we have been hearing from our elders and have grown up with. It is the way of life and we are used to remembering the saying in most of the stages of our life and it is applicable to business as well. Sacrifice in place of ‘giving up’ might be too harsh a term but can be situation based. Generally speaking a business will only flourish when the promoter knows ‘what they are good at’ and ‘why they are liked’ and keep the business basics as standard. The moment, the business starts deviating from its basics, they risk the balance and might succumb to the competition who are more focused. According to Al Ries, there are three areas of sacrifice in business; The Product Line, The Target Market and Constant Change.
The Product Line
The law of Sacrifice is the opposite of the previous law ‘The Law of Line Extension‘ for the Product Line. The primary focus under this law is the sacrifice of the temptation to line expand the product line. Nowhere it is mentioned ‘More Products = More Sales’ and therefore there is no point in complicating the product line with more and unnecessary products. It is always better to keep the product line simple and packed with only proven and time tested products that are liked and accepted by the customers.
Like mentioned in the previous blog ‘The Law of Line Extension’, there is a reason why a customer likes and favors a product or service and that cannot be tweaked or tampered with. An attempt to do so will risk losing the customer to the nearest competition, and once that happens, it is almost impossible to get the customer back in most cases. A smaller product line means a more focussed and dedicated approach in catering to the customers. It also gives a better bandwidth to promote and manage the product effectively in terms of retaining and growing the customer base.
The Target Market
Similar to the previous discussion, expanding the target market is a very common temptation to get into. What this does, is damage to the existing market and does not expand in most of the cases. If a brand is successful in creating a buzz in a particular segment of the market, it is a futile effort to expand the segment. Even worse is when the brand decides to believe that they have captured that segment and therefore have to move on. This is a dangerous development, if at all it is necessary to expand the target market, it is necessary to pay more attention to the existing market than before to avoid any upset in the customer mindset. It is also important that the new market is a logical extension of the existing one and not the opposite.
It is very important to make the existing target market feel the new target market to be the logical progression to be in. For example, a brand that is focused on teens after being very successful might get tempted to expand into a new market. If it is a calculated risk that the brand is making, it is better to expand the market into the middle age segment rather than getting into either the kids segment or the senior citizen segment. It is considerably easy to convince the teenagers to continue their loyalty in spite of the brand positioning its new range of products with middle aged as well. Alternatively, the brand has set a foot hold to retain the loyal teenager to continue his loyalty even after growing to become a middle aged. This no doubt is completely risk free, it depends if the teen age customers would accept the brand to be co-positioning its products between to age groups or two market segments.
The last of the three areas of sacrifice, constant change is never good for anyone, be it an individual or a even a business. It can be either lucky or hard work that a brand tastes success due to the customers liking it. Continuous change can change the brand loyalty of customers significantly against the brand. There are very faint chances that the loyal customers will like the change once or twice and beyond that is the brand decides to meddle with changes, then god only can save them, coz I don’t see any logical explanation as to how one can make logical and calculated decisions to change continuously and still be successful. This was the case thus far, not anymore.
Enter Digital Media into the fray, things have changed drastically, as it can help the brand to get the direction in which the customers want the change and make an informed decision with the customer base and go ahead with the change. Digital Media has given the strength to the marketers to gather information like never before. These days marketers can make informed decisions based on the market research made possible by the digital media data. Data that includes the factors of the past and the signals for the future with analysis such as the ‘What If’ analysis playing a major role in evaluating the risks even before the condition occurs.
