Using Production Transparency to align Marketing Growth Strategies and Capabilities

An avid reader of the Harvard Business Review, I’m always happy when the latest issue is delivered in my mailbox. In the November/December 2020 issue, the article “Is Your Marketing Organization Ready for What’s Next” immediately caught my eye. 

 The article offers a framework for aligning growth strategies and capabilities, to create value in six broad areas with twelve marketing capabilities each (totalling 72). Of these six areas, three are about customer value (engagement, experience, exchange) and three about company value (knowledge, strategic, operational). The authors acknowledge that it is impossible for a brand to grow in all six areas and to leverage all 72 capabilities at once. Instead, they provide a framework to rate the importance of growth of each capability and determine a marketing value proposition for a company.

 I wondered if and how Production Transparency Driven Marketing (PTDM) would fit in these 72 marketing capabilities to deliver the marketing value proposition.

 Customer Value

 Engagement value enhances how customers perceive a brand and their relationship with it. According to the article, “companies increasingly create it by merging traditional techniques such as storytelling and public relations with dynamic content-management systems that facilitate and sometimes automate the design and delivery of real-time messages”.

This seems like a beautiful definition of PTDM. The detailed production timeline offers a dynamic storytelling of who made the individual product the customer is (considering) buying, and how, where and/or when it was made. The timeline could include pictures and videos of each step of the production. Quifactum offers the tools to automate the whole process of capturing the production data and delivering the storytelling to the customers with QR codes and/or NFC labels.

 Sharing the product timelines of the products they bought on social media, encourages customers to interact with each other, creating communities of people who appreciate and advocate sustainable products.

 For example, after the Rana Plaza collapse, customers use #whomademyclothes to demand more engagement from fashion brands. Production Transparency provides an answer to that question and becomes a competitive advantage for those brands who practice PDTM. Naturally, this applies to all verticals of artisanal and quality products in highly competitive markets. 

Marketeers create Experience value when they enhance satisfaction across the customer journey. PTDM enhances marketing capabilities such as “customer experience design” (scanning is fun), “product augmentation” (customer also buy peace of mind knowing that the product was made in sustainable way) and “product innovation” (transparency to prove sustainability).

Exchange value is created when marketeers effectively match their offering to specific customer needs. It requires understanding what the problem is, customers are trying to solve. If this problem is “buying more socially sustainable products”, PTDM can be the perfect tool.  It raises capabilities like “product personalization” (customers know who made the very product they’ve bought), “marketing automation” and “customer relationship management”. Brands could ask “now that you know who we, the people manufacturing your product, are; may we know who you, the customer are, to engage in a personalized one-on-one relationship?”.

Company value

Interestingly, the authors highlight that marketing can generate internal value for a company in three areas as well (strategic, operational and knowledge). At first, Production Transparency seems like a one-way operation: manufacturers share data openly with their customers. Can it also work the other way, with customers generating value for the manufacturers in return? We believe so.

When customers give a review and rating after having read the production timeline, the company can assign this review to the craftsmen who made the product, generating direct feedback. They could even generate performance rankings, as defined by the customers (leveraging capabilities like “interaction model management” and “customer-centric culture management”). Quifactum delivers the tools to capture production data for those companies who do not yet do so (strengthening the “workplace technology” capability). In this way, PTDM can increase a company’s operating effectiveness, creating Operational value.

Processing the scanning data, shares on social media and product reviews by customers, marketeers can identify opportunities for growth (Strategic value) but also track customer sentiment (Knowledge value).                           

Conclusion: it is clear that PTDM checks the boxes on several of the 72 marketing capabilities. Depending on the marketing value proposition defined by a company’s leaders and the change strategy towards it, PTDM can be a key method to implement that strategy.