The Three C’s in Marketing

The three C’s in marketing are known as customers, competition and company. It has the objective of providing the company a competitive advantage front of its competitors, when they are unified and well developed. These aspects depend on each other, so if there is a change in customers it will likely affect the competition as well as the company.

Customers have an essential role in any business, and are many times seen as the base for developing new strategies. Respecting customer needs and wants in the front end of NPD is crucial for the success of a product. In order to figure out what these needs and wants are, usually qualitative and quantitative studies are done to answer these questions. For those reasons, Vincor on a first stage launched a study to understand how the consumers of the refreshment market where behaving, demographics, perceptions of both the category and competitors. This serves as a base for the company to start to understand the market and its behaviors to later develop a more in depth study to understand consumer needs.

With the objective to understand the consumer in a greater depth, Vincor did a qualitative research with focus groups. Establishing the goals and what is the outcome that the company wants is essential before running the researches. Also, the survey format will definitely affect they type and depth of the response the company is seeking. Vincor came back with key findings that were encouraging to take the NPD to next steps despite some drawbacks that had to be taken in consideration while developing the product. To fill out some blanks and understand the winning concept, Vincor combined a qualitative study, which was great to understand in numbers the preference for each concept.

Understanding your competitors and the major players in the market is also necessary in the development of a new product. Mapping the players and their value propositions will help the company in deciding where they should place their product and also create a differentiation towards its competition. Understanding what your potential customers consume and think of your competition is also an important data to collect during the NPD process. Questions 2, 3 and 4 on the “Usage and Attitudinal Survey” shown on Exhibit 4 gave Vincor an idea of what where the favorite brands in the market and the consumption rate. Conducting a greater research and understanding in depth the company's competitors for Project Twist, such as understanding what attributes consumer value in the competition, can certainly help while choosing the most advantageous concept to launch.

The last C to take in consideration is Company. Looking and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your company and its existing products will also work towards knowing what the company is capable of developing and how should it place the product. Vincor understood the capabilities that they had regarding packaging, labeling, bottles, sales expertise and took in consideration while making choices during project Twist. Understanding the gains and learning with the errors of the previous projects inside the company can serve as an advantage in the development of a new product. Promoting an integration between areas as Vincor did in the offsite meeting and having cross functional teams can help gather insights from different areas and understand what can and