The 5 Cs for Products and Services Permalink missing above

The 5 Cs incorporates thinking from many of the prior frameworks such as the SWOT, TAM/SAM/SOM, PEST, and the 4 Ps. Think of it as a comprehensive analytical roadmap that drives marketing plans. When well done, it is not just a summary of ideas. It is a deep analytical research piece supported by hard numbers and facts on the ground. It will leverage primary and secondary research information.

The analysis includes five key critical analytical drivers:

1) The Company: The purpose here is to determine the key company advantage versus any competitor. This can include patents, first mover advantages, unique market positioning, geographic advantage, research, new uses for products and services, psychological, etc. It must be unique, sustainable, convincing, easily protected, easily executed, and simple to communicate. A SWOT analysis is the basis for this section, but in the 5 Cs you have to dig deep for information.

2) Collaborators: These can be vertical or horizontal collaborators. They could include system integrators and manufacturers as well as companies and people that can help you market a product or service. Collaborators could include key influencers, products, or services that can be marketed along with your product. Think along the lines of breakfast marketing where you may be the seller of eggs and your distributor could be a local dairy that is delivering milk door-to-door.

3) Customers: This is the cohort of people who are likely to buy the product or service. This area is informed by the TAM/SAM/SOM analysis as well as detailed secondary and primary research findings. Describe your customers in detail: age, income, gender, location, behaviors, ethnicity, religion, likes, dislikes, their personal goals as they relate to your product, the problem(s) they need to solve, their wants, and their desires. Why will they buy your product? What are the specific hard facts that support the need for your product or service?

4) Competitors: This analysis defines the market in which you will be selling.

• • • First: Refer to the TAM/SAM/SOM analysis to understand the market you are really competing in, which may be defined by dollar size, geography, your potential customers, and even the resources your company can allocate to the product or service you are selling.
    • Second: Identify the top five companies you compete with and enumerate the facts that make them your competitors. Discuss their advantages and disadvantages versus those of your company:  the resources they have that you don’t, and their key advantages and disadvantages. These five companies should be “reasonable” competitors in that they are similar in size in terms of volume or sales.
    • Third: Define the five products or services within these companies that are the direct competitors to your product or service. Create a detailed comparison that outlines advantages and disadvantages using hard facts and numbers. Find primary and secondary resource information to support your analysis.

5) Context and Climate: What are the current business conditions, external, macro factors, economic, legal, emerging technologies, opinions?

• • • This is driven by your PEST analysis but goes into greater detail. Here you would define very specifically what is going on in the market.
    • What are the politics that are driving a particular market in terms of taxation or fiscal or social policy or election rhetoric, war or peace, downturns or upturns in the economy? Are there new, emerging technologies that could threaten your product or service in the near or far term? Are there fringe social views that have the potential to become mainstream that could affect your marketing efforts? Or the opposite: are there indications on the horizon that population changes in terms of age, income, or education may change the need for a product or service?
    • For example, in the United States after World War II, the government paid for GIs to get higher education, which drove the expansion of universities, colleges, and trade schools and resulted in higher income for millions of people. In turn, this drove housing (supported by low cost GI home mortgages), which then drove a housing boom. This also goes in reverse: changing demographics, employment needs, and expectations in the early 2000s created a serious problem for people taking out student loans that they cannot pay off. How would this impact a business idea?
    • Another example is Women Labor Force Participation: in the United States, 33% of women worked outside the home in 1950; by 1990 it was 60% (dropping back to 57% in 2022).
      • What does this mean? Consider this perspective: If women are still the primary caregivers, will the increase in labor force participation drive the need for more convenient products, more babysitter help, more care-certified caregivers for the elderly, a greater need for disposable diapers, simplified dinner prep?
    • Other social factors include the following: state by state or even county by county attitudes; social issues that include abortion, LGBTQ, gun control, Medicaid, masks or no masks, vaccines or no vaccines. The job here is not to comment or take sides, but to recognize the issues that your customer cohort is concerned with and to market accordingly, delivering the appropriate message to the people you want to sell to or change the opinion of.

These reference videos will improve your understanding of this framework.