About Pragmatic Marketing Framework

Pragmatic marketing framework: The Pragmatic Framework breaks down the essential activities required to develop and market products people want. It gives you and your team a common language to help your organization better understand your market and its issues.

Pragmatic Marketing Explained

Would you like to start in a market that is already hungry for your product? Pragmatic Marketing could be the framework you want! After all, no one wants to promise a product launch only to see little (or no) demand for their solution from users.

The pragmatic marketing framework helps you fight this possibility by allowing you to design products that respond to market problems.

This article gives you the ultimate guide to this data-driven, customer-centric marketing framework. It helps you design and present a product to an audience just as eager about your solution as you are.

What is Pragmatic Marketing?

Pragmatic marketing is a customer-centric framework that stimulates you to design products for exact spectators. It’s about delivering a product that resolves real problems for your customers, and this, in turn, endorses brand empathy.

But what distinguishes this approach from normal product development? Some modern design models lead product teams to create a product and find a need to fill it.

In contrast, a pragmatic marketing strategy encourages product managers to let market problems dictate which solutions a product team should develop. These problems are first discovered through customer surveys. From there, continuous product testing helps develop the final result.

When product tweaking and testing are integrated into the build phase, the final product is more likely to reach a target market. But even after product launches, product teams will conduct ongoing reviews to ensure the product is always relevant, practical, and in high demand.

How Does Pragmatic Marketing Work?

Initially founded by the Pragmatic Institute, Pragmatic marketers champion outside voices and opinions, not the assumptions of the product team. Of course, there’s no reason why you can’t take a more informal approach to what’s being demonstrated.

You can start having more conversations with your development team and customers.

It may be a bitter pill, but your audience knows more about your ideal product than you do. Starting chats with them is one of the fastest methods to get your product off the ground.

What are the Profits of Pragmatic Marketing?

• One of the critical profits of pragmatic marketing is the increased chance of reaching an enthusiastic audience.
• Another reason a product manager might prefer a pragmatic approach is because it creates a flywheel for their product design processes.
• The “outside-in approach” improves customer relationships through continuous testing and discussion.
• It also extends and improves the lifecycle and relevance of your product. This is because pragmatic marketing statements areas in dire need of helpful innovation.
• Another advantage of the pragmatic framework is that it can improve team efficiency.
• Despite the enlargement of the product development cycle, the pragmatic approach means you spend less time developing bugs.
• According to the Harvard Business School, firms launch about 30,000 new products yearly, and 95% will disappear without warning.
• These products and their modern roadmaps fail because they are based on assumed product stewardship.
• Pragmatic marketing escapes this eventuality by involving the customer from day one. It helps companies develop products with a concrete strategy and built-in distinctive competency.
• With 25% of global sales and profits coming from new product launches, a pragmatic approach seems highly tempting.

What are the Disadvantages of Pragmatic Marketing?

• The disadvantages of the pragmatic marketing method are the same for any product development plan: Bringing successful products to market is not informal.
• It’s a high-risk endeavor that includes a lot of long-term planning. Even when you have a great solution to a dangerous problem, it’s not always value it.
• Another downside of the pragmatic approach is the ambiguity you may encounter when identifying which problems need to be addressed.
• For example, some clients have particular market problems. Is it worth investing time and resources to solve these problems?
• What if the answer you provide doesn’t necessarily solve the problem in the way your customers expect?
• You don’t want to find that you’ve spent a lot of time and effort on an approach that resulted in a useless solution, even when you’ve analyzed market segments to improve a great roadmap.

How do You Resolve if a Problem is Worth Solving?

Now that we have a moral understanding of pragmatic marketing, you may wonder how to identify issues worth addressing in your market.

• What if you’ve spotted a problem but can’t convince your product team or manager?
• Worse yet, what if you need to convince internal and external stakeholders?

To analyze whether possible product gaps are worth addressing, ask yourself the following four questions:

• Does the problem require an urgent solution?
• Do you have room for maneuver to develop critical solutions?
• Would the public pay for a solution to the problem?
• Is the problem widespread?

Are all the answers to these questions yes? If so, congratulations! You’ve found a niche for a new solution: a product that customers might want to buy.

But before you can be sure your product will sell, you need to dig deeper into the big picture. Let’s see that now.

Pragmatic Marketing Framework: 7 Steps

The pragmatic method isn’t for everybody, but there are some energetic steps you can take to ensure such a plan works for you.

Here’s a quick breakdown of how to use the framework itself.

1) Discover Market Gaps and Problems

Before designing your product, you must first outline your target markets.

Next, you need to start discovering the user requirements for these goals. Analysis of user segments is crucial for deeper understanding, as is an exploration of currently available solutions.

Are there alternative offerings or competing products that you are up against?

If so, why are you better equipped to help your target segments?

These questions are an integral part of the outside-in approach advocated by the Pragmatic Institute.

2) Define Product Roadmaps

Once you have a picture of your customers’ market problems, you can define your product focus. It’s about developing buyer-centric use cases for the product you’re designing.

A crucial factor in this is determining whether or not the chosen market is worthwhile.

Ask yourself:

• Can this market problem sustain your product?
• What are the buying preferences of your market?
• Are there a lot of untapped potential customers waiting for a solution?
• What is the perception of the clients of your company? Are you better equipped to offer a solution?

You should also know what problems your new solution will solve. This allows you to develop a list of features and create a roadmap that makes sense.

Remember: While your average product manager focuses on traditional, relatively linear roadmaps, pragmatic marketers aren’t afraid to step back to do more research.

So keep talking to customers, do your research, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of your plan.

3) Design a Corporate Plan and Your Product

The following step in pragmatic marketing is to develop a business plan that targets the exact market segmentation you’ve already discovered. This way, you ensure that your entire team works in the same direction to achieve the product’s success.

To ensure your business plans align with the pragmatic framework, start by outlining your business objective, target customer, and value proposal.

From there, it’s time to surprise design and test your product with your business plan in mind.

4) Determine Product Positioning

The research you’ve already done should have given you some essential principles to follow when creating a problem-oriented product.

Next, you also need to understand better the broader audience you serve. Doing this means less guesswork once you get to the actual launch.

You may already have a list of customers you’ve built a relationship with, but for your product to be successful, you also want to acquire new customers.

Design broader buyer personas from previous customer research to start positioning your product.

Focus on the following points:

• The problem your market has
• How your solution solves this problem
• Are behaviors relevant to your product or business, e.g., What about your product will arouse the curiosity of your customers?
• The buying process of this target group, e.g., what sales channel is the most effective target for marketing your product?
• Alternative offers or competing causes that could stand in your way

5) Prepare Release Plans

Outdated product roadmaps often go awry because they don’t align with the buyer’s intent and journey.

With pragmatic marketing, you create plans and an adoption strategy that truly reflects that journey. Helps eliminate missed opportunities.

Your launch plans should include the following:

• An ideal schedule
• What activities will be carried out during each phase of the project?
• Who is responsible for this activity?
• For example, in what way will your product marketing manager engage your target audience and stand out in a competitive landscape?
• What will your sales strategy be, and what marketing channels will you mark?
• Will you focus mainly on social media marketing, SEO marketing, paid advertising, or a combination of these?
• Could you use recommendation software to automate customer acquisition?
• Regardless of your sales strategies, how will you engage other departments to demonstrate your product portfolio fully?

To learn more about positively marketing a B2B product, check out our guide to the 5 B2B Marketing Strategies You Can Appliance Today.

6) Start Selling

Subject to the personality of your product manager/team, this next phase can be either extremely exciting or incredibly stressful.

Maybe you’re launching in front of an enthusiastic audience following updates from your development team. Maybe try to make a splash at industry trade shows.

Regardless of how you launch your product and start selling it, remember: the best pragmatic product is the one that repeatedly adapts to the customer.

So don’t forget to monitor your product’s performance. Also, ask for ratings and testimonials as well as feedback.

And if your product isn’t producing the results you expect, it’s time to take notice. This makes you the next step in pragmatic marketing.

7) Provide Support and Evaluate Reviews

• To say that this section covers the “final” part of the pragmatic marketing framework is a bit misleading.
• Truly, pragmatic marketers never rest!
• After the product launch, the most effective pragmatic product managers will reconnect with customers.
• They use tools like customer satisfaction surveys and NPS scores to uncover potential pain points their customers may have encountered.
• More wide surveys and focus groups can also identify such issues, as can a blogger outreach campaign.
• This is an outstanding technique as it helps build relationships with potential influencers and identify other product issues.
• If all went according to plan, the feedback and change requests you receive should be minimal at this point.
• After all, the entire pragmatic marketing process is designed to meet customer needs and solve problems more efficiently.
• In case of unpleasant surprises, make sure your customer service and support are well prepared.
• In these cases, Disney’s HEARD framework is an excellent tool to restore customer service, regardless of industry or sector.

No matter how successful your start is, there will always be changes you can make for the better. Both the problems of the market and its competitors will change over time.

It means that there will soon be more problems to tackle and more solutions to develop.

Pragmatic Marketing Framework Key Takeaway

Fascinated by the possibilities of the pragmatic marketing framework? Here are some key points to remember:

• Traditional product design models often lead product teams to develop a product before a real market problem is discovered.
• The pragmatic marketing strategy encourages product managers to let the market decide which solutions their team should develop.
• Before creating the final product, pragmatic developers go through multiple customer interviews and continuous rounds of testing.
• When ongoing customer feedback is incorporated into the project development phase, the likelihood of a successful launch is much higher.

Conclusion

Every company that builds new products introduces new solutions or constantly releases product upgrades uses a product roadmap. These roadmaps outline the product vision and strategy, making it easy for internal and external stakeholders to make informed decisions.

However, traditional product roadmaps are outdated, and traditional roadmaps do not show the vision of the problem that the company is annoying to solve. A good roadmap should highlight the exact situation that needs to be addressed and explain why prospects, customers, and the market need to fix it.

As in pragmatic marketing, a more differentiated view ensures that all aspects of the product development cycle are covered. It requires you to have all the information you need from customers at a high level so you can bring the best solution to market.

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