No. 5 alone will help you outperform 99% of the competition.
There are 5 marketing concepts in business invented since the time capitalism was born. But in the age of online personal branding, no one has looked at them from that lens.
Until now. Let’s get into it.
- The Production Concept
- The Product Concept
- The Selling Concept
- The Marketing Concept
- The Societal Marketing Concept
1. The Production Concept
The PRODUCTION Concept is the oldest in the book and comes straight out of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. It’s focused on the scale of economies. That means max efficiency, low costs, and mass distribution.
This is a great approach to use when consumers just want the product regardless of how it looks or what it does, but not vice versa. Think developing countries and startups.
How to use the production concept for your personal brand
When you’re thinking of growing your self-authority and your personal brand, you’re a newbie. And when you’re a newbie to the game, you always want to focus on the production of content.
This is because you have no idea what other people will want from you and what you can monetize in the future. You don’t know what will be your “thing.” And it’s so important to find what that is. In startup terms, it’s called product-market fit.
But when you’re a personal brand, you want to find this fit in a way that can help you grow sustainably. Because out of the 5 marketing concepts, you need to worry about this as a newbie creator.
Dos and Don’ts of the production concept
How many personal brands have you seen create content and then burn out? It’s because they’re not creating content that they actually like either. It’s important to find a blend of what the audience actually wants and what you love creating.
So you have to try out a lot of different things before you land on what you can capitalize on. Take time to explore and experiment. But be careful!
Being too conceptual can hurt you. It inherently means you’re limited in giving long-term value to larger audiences. So someone might come to your account and bounce immediately if they don’t understand how you provide them with value.
Rule of 👍: Keep a close look at your metrics and do more of what works. Focus on doing it better and faster.
2. The Product Concept
The PRODUCT Concept is different than the first. This one is focused on consumers who want the best product with the highest quality. That means having the best performance and most innovation in their class.
Everything is done to top quality for max memorability and the utmost customer experience. Think Apple and premium luxury brands. The product is highly rated, and so are the prices.
How to use the product concept for your personal brand
This is a great concept to use no matter what stage you’re at. If you focus on making the best content you can make you are already ahead of the game. But associating yourself with top personal brands and doing an overhaul of your brand identity will help you shine.
This concept is fantastic for personal brands that have discovered their own authentic style. What they’ve done is create a niche of one. That means their content, products, & services all revolve around them and their specific intersection of expertise.
When you’re a personal brand, you have the flexibility to cover a few topics rather than just one. This makes you far more compelling than if you just tried to be the best at one thing. You see tons of prolific creators taking on this concept because they focus on their craft and specific knowledge.
Dos and Don’ts of the product concept
If you haven’t already, make yourself premium amongst the rest. It’s the most timeless brand strategy out of the 5 marketing concepts. But watch out! Many brands are at risk of falling into the “we do it better” or “we do it differently” ideology.
When there are a ton of premium brands in a space all doing things “their own way,” it will seem cliché and overdone. It’s because people no longer identify or are attracted to being premium because it feels like a mental trap.
This can turn off mass amounts of people who would have otherwise been interested in your niche or you. Instead, find your niche of one, compete with who you were yesterday, and continually make yourself more exciting and expensive.
Rule of 👍: Find the magical area at the intersection of your interests. Then create high-quality, artistic, and creative thought leadership to represent it. Excite your audience with it.
3. The Selling Concept
The SELLING Concept is the most commonly known out of the 5 marketing concepts. We know it because we interact with this the most as consumers. The philosophy was built on the belief that consumers will not buy from you if they are left to their own devices.
While there’s some truth to this, this approach was technically supposed to be used when you had a surplus of product and needed to get it off the shelves. But it’s used way more in an interconnected world. Think ClickFunnels and your 7-figure+ entrepreneurs
How to use the selling concept for your personal brand
This is a great concept to use when you are wondering how to monetize what you’ve created. Creating an irresistible high ticket offer is an accompaniment to the top personal brands online. This is because there is much involved when you create and give value at any level online.
Due to this inherent consumer inertia we fight with on a day-to-day basis, you’re forced to take on newfound strategies, aggressive tactics, and self-promotion. Focus on the channels in which to connect with customers and stay top of mind. But be cautious!
Dos and Don’ts of the selling concept
While selling and promotion are a necessity, use the selling concept with awareness. You should be careful not to use this to gain every last dollar or sell your own aggressive tactics or worldview.
Brands that do this without focusing on a premium quality product or service tend to come off as annoying, cheap, and inhumane. If you forget who you’re here selling to, you will not be able to monetize anything you make.
Rule of 👍: Focus on serving others. To sell is to serve. Make sure your offers and selling reflect that.
4. The Marketing Concept
The MARKETING Concept challenges the first three marketing concepts because it’s only focused on a specific target market. It’s all about serving the customer’s needs in an integrated communication system that is built to churn a profit.
Out of the 5 marketing concepts, this one is the basis of consultative selling that is focused on customer satisfaction. This approach reaches the goals of the first three concepts but does it better because of a permission-based approach. Think Seth Godin and opt-in pages.
How to use the marketing concept for your personal brand
Personal brands that utilize the marketing concept are quite established in their space. They have a working system that is built around marketing their many offers to their customers at different touchpoints along their journey.
This is because it’s more complex and you need specialized knowledge on how to connect your audience at different stages of their journey. It’s smooth and well thought out because of how specific it is.
This approach gives you clarity in organizing your brand, content, and offers in a systematic way towards serving at the stage your audience and customers are at. Without being pushy, but being attractive at the right time.
Dos and Don’ts of the marketing concept
You’ll obviously want to use this concept when you have many different offers to sell and you’re more advanced. But keep an eye out! While this may seem exactly like a great answer, consumers are warier than ever of marketing funnels.
People tend to be far more sensitive to being sold to from a top-down approach. They can sense that a pitch is coming at some point in a webinar, conference, or blog post. And personal brands that don’t come off as genuine can easily be seen as manipulative and greedy..
But all is not lost. Focus on relating to your customer so they don’t feel like an object in your marketing machine. Make your offers specific to where they are at the right time.
Rule of 👍: Do research. Take a bird’s eye look at your brand, content, and offers. Create a synergistic marketing system that follows the customer’s journey.
5. The Societal Marketing Concept
The SOCIETAL MARKETING Concept was originally “the marketing concept” but is by far the most superior and rare. It is actually focused on enhancing the well-being of a consumer.
It thinks through not only what’s best for the consumer, but for the society, the consumer lives in. This philosophy grew out of mass global movements and issues where competitive advantage just doesn’t cut it anymore.
The harsh truth is: consumers are wary of approaches 1-4.
- Production can come from sketchy means and sources that turn out to be harmful to people and the environment.
- Product quality can be obsessed with playing zero-sum status games and encouraging their buyers to do the same.
- Selling can feel aggressive, manipulative, cheap, and inhumane with any and every power tactic used to turn a profit.
- Marketing can feel stale, robotic and insensitive to the varying human nuances and needs people go through.
How to use the societal marketing concept for your personal brand
Personal brands that use this approach are one of the three types of creators on the rise in 2022. When you use this approach from the 5 marketing concepts, you must be community and people-focused. The best way you see brands doing this is around their personal philosophy.
Personal philosophy opens a creator up to share empathetically with the audience they serve. And creating a community from your personal philosophy ensures you have a positive effect on people.
Speak on issues you find relevant to your identity, industry, region, society. Take an interest in the audience listening and interview them. Find out what will bring them well-being and how your skills and what you offer can affect them to be a creator of their own life.
Dos and Don’ts of the societal marketing concept
While everyone is busy doing approaches 1-4, you can beat 99% of the competition with this approach alone. You can do this by focusing on learning about people. Learn what they deeply desire, what they fear and what makes up their lives. And speak to it from experience!
People want to hear from others who can identify and relate to their human experience. When you are able to do that, you open up a psychologically safe space only cults are able to pull off. But don’t be a dork!
More and more we have small communities and subcultures forming around horrible mindsets and mental models. Be careful of what you stand for and represent. You can easily do more harm than good if you’re on a woke train.
Rule of 👍: Have real human conversations. Don’t just seek research or information, but be heartfelt and share openly. Doing this empowers your community to grow stronger and taller.
TLDR?
- Focus on the systems of producing tons of content to see what gets attention.
- Focus on making your brand identity premium.
- Understand how to create and close irresistible high ticket offers.
- Create a marketing machine that works while you sleep.
- Create a community focused on your personal philosophy.
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