Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

products/services – in terms of what they do for customers, not in terms of how they are 
produced, or by whom;
● 
customers – in terms of important differences between groups in needs, preferences, 
priorities or ways of buying.
For example, vast arrays of retail financial services products provided by banks and their 
competitors can be reduced to six categories of products by considering what customer 
benefits they provide. Rather than hundreds of products, the market consists of only six 
groups of products and services to: provide access to cash; provide security of savings; buy 
now, pay later; make cashless payments; get a return on assets such as savings; and acquire 
a range of specialist services. The same process of reduction can be applied to products/ser-
vices. For example, do not describe the market as ‘computers’, but as what different mixes 
of computer hardware, software and services actually deliver to customers in a particular 
market, such as accounting systems, internal communications, management information 
and so on.
This approach provides a start in defining markets in such a way that we move past the 
core market of similar products to find the extended market. This analysis can be used for 
a variety of purposes, but one advantage of this type of initial approach is that it starts to 
identify the way a market divides into distinctly different segments.
Figure 9.2 
The product–
customer matrix
Products/Services
Cust
omers

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DEFINING HOW THE MARKET IS SEGMENTED
9.1.3 Other ways of defining markets 
Ecosystem marketing 
More recently, Kotler and Sarkar (2019) have examined the concept of ecosystems in marketing. 
In ecosystem marketing the market is understood as a network of participants within ‘four dis-
tinct yet interrelated ecosystems’ (company, competitor, category and customer), and ‘companies 
must understand the dynamics of competition in their ecosystems’ ( Kotler and Sarkar, 2019 ).