July 2020

by Iveta Merlinova

SUSTAINABLE MARKETING ELEMENTS

MOLECULAR MARKETING | Market Leadership Creative Modeling

CINNAM Supports The Sustainable Development Goals

ALDEHYDE Molecular Business Systems®

Forward

CINNAM is a management consulting company and a professional network focused on business innovation and sustainable market leadership enhancement. We support our clients in dynamic moments such as strategic change and transformation, start-upping, emergency and crisis management, new offer launching, customer experience momentum, and service proposal boost, inside profit e non-profit contexts.

CINNAM offers its assistance within both content-oriented (upstream and downstream marketing, bid management, circular economy, innovation management, business modeling and planning), and people-oriented (mentoring, change management, creativity empowerment) projects, interdependent, complementary and usually combined together, with the aim at increasing the overall project efficiency, efficacy, sustainability and people wellbeing.

CINNAM Services include Strategic Advisory, Executive Mentoring, Interim Management, Smart Consulting and Creative Labs. They are activated separately or in a systemic multidisciplinary combination for the following deliverables: Market & Customer Insights; Value Proposition Models; Sustainable Business Strategies; Service & Experience Design; Change & Innovation Programs; Marketing & Communication Plans.

We are agile, creative and consistent: alongside with design thinking, content and management innovation go engineering and performance measurement, respecting people, society, nature and budgets.

Enterprises, both in service and manufacturing, as well as networks and individuals benefit from our approach. We have a wealth of experience in sectors such as facility management, automotive, health care and wellbeing, customer care, delivery and distribution services, fashion, design and food, as well as within the non-profit organizations and business schools.

MOLECULAR MARKETING is our proprietary methodology regarding the market-leadership creative modeling, based on the ten basic principles of thinking and execution: vision-driven and value-based, human-oriented, resilient, systemic, creative, sustainable, leading and aligned, collaborative, model-based, and measurable.

Its mindset was shared in 2013 through the book written by Iveta Merlinova: MOLECULAR MARKETING - Market Leadership Creative Modeling. The architecture of the book reflects three main areas of concern within today’s marketing innovation: on the first level, the innovation of marketing elements/drivers structured through the Molecular Marketing Table of Elements; on the second level, innovation in marketing processes; on the third level, innovation in marketing models that defines a higher level of competition and innovation than its elements do.

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Molecular Marketing Elements

Nowadays, markets request business innovation and creativity, efficiency combined with flexibility, technology mixed with empathy, and human touch. The actual global market exchanges have to be supported by creative integrated solutions, hardly provided by traditional marketing processes and their tools.

Molecular Marketing Elements (MM Elements) are marketing drivers perceived as basic units capable of satisfying a specific market and customers’ needs and subsequently used as the elementary building blocks of the marketing and business offering. These units are subsequently combined and used within the processes of Marketing Molecule Design that define a company’s integrated proposal to the customer.

Today’s marketing offering usually has its:

MM Elements are multidimensional and this segmentation is fundamentally conceptual and functional to a simpler introduction of some of the most frequently used MM Elements in today’s business practice. Obviously, different qualities of the same element could be proposed alternatively and for different transactional, relational, and/or collaborative needs, generating different benefits for different clients or for the same customer in different phases of the interaction process with the company.

Transactional MM Elements have roots in the traditional marketing philosophy. They are aimed at creating, promoting, distributing, and pricing products and services, and substantially at selling products or services and concluding commercial negotiations.

The basic Transactional MM Elements are Product, Place, Promotion, and Price. Alongside them, Packaging, Design, and Advertising are considered as unique elements. Furthermore, since new needs and increasing customer sophistication ask for innovative transactional elements, three of these elements could be mentioned: Time, Ecology and Entertainment.

This list is naturally not exhaustive, and in each company, the Transactional MM Elements are progressively enriched and modified.

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Relational MM Elements help to acquire, keep, and develop relationships with customers and other stakeholders. Consequently, all business transactions and products/services life cycles have to be managed within a customer-relationship life cycle, as a particular event and business opportunity.

There is another important difference between transactional and relational marketing: transactions, relatively short-term-oriented, are based on a strong initial offering and product quality; relationships and their exploitation need long-term horizons and, if correctly managed, are stronger and deeper after some time and not immediately at the beginning of the interaction with a customer. From the methodological perspective, the product life-cycle management evolves through offerings’ differentiation and diversification; the customer life-cycle management is based on the integration and synthesis of social, motivational, ethical, and other relational aspects.

Relationship is a specific MM Element perceived as a set of social associations, connections, or affiliations between two or more people. They vary in their differing levels of intimacy and sharing, implying the discovery or establishment of a common ground.

The selection of other Relational MM Elements focuses on three functional groups: the first group is usually a core part of the business offering and includes Service, Experience, Information, Knowledge, and Brand; to the second group belong those elements such as Sales and Customer Care that proactively enable customer interaction, insight, customer learning, customer satisfaction and loyalty management; in the third group two specific and transversal elements of the customer relationship management are introduced: People (frontline people, back-line personnel, and customers), and Technology that permits the tracking and understanding of customer behavior and attitudes.

Collaborative MM Elements create value through many-to-many interactions, online and in the real world. Obviously, the Internet has radically expanded and replaced all kinds of previously used social and business relations (below-the-line communication mix, industrial districts, buyers’ groups, and others) and the term networking is today linked especially to collaboration on the web and to blended online/offline activities.

Collaborative marketing has introduced new MM Elements into the offering, which do not just absorb transactional and simple relational approaches but often eliminate them; smart businesses have accelerated the whole business speed, rhythm, and changed the process of value creation.

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We mention hereunder ten selected Collaborative MM Elements: Hard-Net (tangible infrastructures for networking), Soft-Net (software systems for connectivity); Social Media (collaborative communication media & channels); Marketspace (e-commerce and distribution systems); Cluster (group of affiliated people); Bridge (network relationship ties); Co-N-Tent (web content production and procurement); N-Fluence (viral communication and lobbying); Agent (collaboration activators and motivators); Integrator (collaborative marketing integrator).

Transactional, relational, and collaborative elements generate an integrated continuous offering system to customers. We describe this unique system of Marketing Elements through three dimensions, graphically illustrated in the Molecular Marketing Table of Elements (MM Table of Elements).

1. the first dimension evaluates a potential contribution of each marketing element to the customer relationship quality, defined as “low” at the beginning of the relationship (when a company is acquiring the customer) and “high” after having obtained the customer’s trust, commitment, loyalty, and partnership;

2. the second dimension distinguishes the marketing elements’ tangibility (solid, liquid, gas) in order to balance a sustainable mix of price, flexibility, perceived risk, and branding;

3. the third dimension reflects the level of the experience, starting from the rational/functional one (considered as basic) and growing, through different aspects (emotional, sensorial, and others), to the holistic one (rich, profound, multidimensional).

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Using the MM Table of Elements framework, some interesting observations can be done in regard to the positioning of the presented elements:

• The three traditional marketing mix of elements - Product, Price, Advertising, along with Packaging, are mostly transactional and are used to acquire customers, and, if not enriched by interactive and experiential features, they can have a poor, short-lasting contribution to the quality of the company-customer relationship.

• Place and Promotion, on the other hand, even in their essential formats, are strongly relational and create an important bridge between traditional and relational marketing.

• Furthermore, Ecology, Design, Time and Entertainment enter into the category of elements that allow a company to move the offering toward a relational customer interaction and exchange as well, with new experiential connotations and benefits.

• The relational elements assure the continuum between transactional and collaborative customer interactions and add new value dimensions to the company’s offering. In practice, they are deployed in the three main CRM areas: operational, analytical, and collaborative.

• The collaborative elements tend to be positioned in the lower right part of the MM Table of Elements: they are mostly intangible and with a high ranking in terms of relationship quality. This high quality is not so much due to the depth of a single relationship as to the insertion of it into a system of relationships, its connectivity and interaction potential; the collaborative elements don’t necessarily improve bilateral partnerships.

• The collaborative elements involve all company stakeholders and modify company commercial and information boundaries; they could transform an individual Experience into a collective one or open a simple product acquisition for the entrance to a new brand community.

Single MM Elements create more or less strong bonds among themselves, take new forms, and shape new complex substances - Marketing Molecules. This marketing “chemistry” is a creative process; various solutions can arise from combining the basic elements, and the choice of the final alternative is a matter of overall feasibility, sustainability and market appeal.

The Marketing Molecule equals a company’s integrated marketing offer for a new customer experience, with new competitive benefits and advantages.

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MM Elements’ Contribution to the SDGs

For all of us, after the single and global experience with COVID-19, it has become mandatory to create a different, more real and shared value, and to find new purposes for re-launch and growth. This crisis has become an opportunity to put sustainability at the core of the company marketing strategies, to take honestly care of people and the planet, and to contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals achievement.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) define global sustainable development priorities and aspirations for 2030 and seek to mobilize global efforts around a common set of goals and targets. The SDGs explicitly call on all businesses to apply their creativity and innovation to solve sustainable development challenges. The SDGs present an opportunity for business-led solutions and technologies to be developed and implemented to address the world’s biggest sustainable development challenges.

Covering a wide spectrum of sustainable development topics relevant to companies, the SDGs can help to connect business strategies with global priorities. Companies can use the SDGs as a framework to shape, steer and communicate their strategies, goals and activities, allowing them to capitalize on a range of benefits such as identifying future business opportunities or delivering innovative solutions and transformative change.

Our mission is to help enterprises achieving a sustainable development; to find the right balance among resilience, efficiency and innovation. Business cannot succeed in societies that fail. We give support to companies and organizations focused on sustainable strategic development, in terms of profitability, ethical behavior, social justice and environment.

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Our services and decision-making processes follow and respect the 17 Sustainable Development Goals or their selection: 1 - No Poverty; 2 - Zero Hunger; 3 Good Health and Well-being; 4 - Quality Education; 5 - Gender Equality; 6 - Clean Water and Sanitation; 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy; 8 - Decent Work and Economic Growth; 9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure; 10 - Reduced Inequality; Sustainable Cities and Communities; 12 - Responsible Consumption and Production; 13 - Climate Action; 14 - Life Below Water; 15 - Life on Land; 16 - Peace and Justice Strong Institutions; 17 - Partnerships to achieve the Goal.

This understanding has changed our approach to sustainability management, anyhow already important in all our previous activities. For example, Ecology and People have been considered immediately, from the first applications of the MM Modeling, as the most important MM Elements and business development drivers.

Our today’s comprehension of sustainability goes surely far beyond these individual dimensions; it has been enlarged to new spheres and applied transversally through all MM Elements and Marketing Molecules.

There are two basic ways how to put it in practice:

1. Verifying and enhancing the MM Elements’ Potential Contribution to SDGs that have been selected as priorities for the company’s strategic development guidelines;

2. Introducing new MM Elements, not only with a high experiential and relational quality, but with a high sustainability quality as well.

The first approach requests to exploit new evaluation and decision-making frameworks, with an additional level of complexity, functional to the Marketing Molecule Design. The selected valuable MM Elements, along with the Customer Journey and during the Offering Life Cycle will be a priori aligned to the SDGs.

The second approach calls for marketing creativity and business innovation focused on the SDGs. Some of the MM Elements get obsolete faster than others; their innovation process is not homogeneous. Furthermore it has to be integrated with the processes’ and models’ innovation. Within the innovation processes focused on the SDGs, both technology-driven, market-driven, and design-driven factors are activated and developed.

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Sustainable Value Innovation Modeling

Sustainable Value Innovation Models are decision-making tools and are functional on all company levels: for strategic business and brand portfolios, for specific business units, as well as for customer journeys and experience design.

The SDGs filters, introduced into the evaluation and innovation of the MM Elements and into the process of Marketing Molecule Design, have caused important changes to our Value Proposition Modeling (VPM-ALDEHYDE MBS®), Sustainable Value Innovation (SVI-ALDEHYDE MBS®) and Service & Experiential Design (SED-ALDEHYDE MBS®) methodologies.

Our approach to Sustainable Value Innovation Modeling has become more integrated and consistent. Today’s solutions treat in a new way social, environmental and innovation elements and processes. They illustrate, using often the design thinking tools and languages, the fundamental idea and mechanisms of how organizations create, provide and acquire core value in the multidimensional reality of the market, balancing the involved stakeholders’ perspective and contributing to the SDGs.

ReferencesIveta Merlinova (2015), Molecular Marketing : Market Leadership Creative Modeling, 2°ed., CINNAM, Milano.

Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. United Nations, 2015.

Challenges and Opportunities in the Post-COVID-19 World, Insight Report. World Economic Forum, 2020.

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Contacts

www.cinnam.com

info@cinnam.com

LinkedIn - Iveta Merlinova

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