5 Cs of Marketing | How to conduct a 5c analysis | What are the five C’s of marketing? Definition and examples
Table of Contents
The Five C’s of Marketing are the five most important areas of marketing. When marketing executives make marketing decisions, they should consider the five C’s of marketing. The five C’s stand for Company, Customers, Collaborators, Competitors, and Climate. The five C’s act as a guideline when we are creating a marketing plan or devising a marketing strategy.
A marketing strategy exists when a company combines all its goals and objectives into one plan.
The Five C’s of Marketing is an extension of the Three C’s, which just covered competitors, customers, and company.
A 5C analysis, alongside other widely used business tools like the SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats), serves as a method for helping professionals make decisions and construct actionable marketing strategies. Often, a defined marketing plan will include instructions for undertaking a review of the 5 C’s at regular intervals, such as every six months or on an annual basis.
The 5 Cs of Marketing
- Company
- Collaborators
- Customers
- Competitors
- Climate
By evaluating these aspects of your business, you’ll have a good high-level view of your business. Whenever it comes time to make decisions about your marketing, you’ll have a cheat sheet that will help you better decisions.
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How to conduct a 5c analysis – Questions to ask
Company ( 01 of 5 Cs of Marketing )
Why did we start with “company”? Because we think it’s always important to check in with yourself. Go ahead, take a deep breath, and get ready to look inward.
Some 5C adherents rank “capabilities” among the elements of their analysis. For our purposes, we’ll view that term as being largely synonymous with the “company” category.
Begin by asking yourself questions related to your own business:
- What does my company sell? List your major product lines or types.
- Do our products vary from competitors’ products? If so, in what ways?
- What competitive advantage does my company have?
- What makes my brand unique or memorable?
- What does my business do better than others?
- What does my business do worse than others?
- How do customers view my business?
- If I suddenly gained $10,000 to invest in my business, where would I invest it?
- If I suddenly had to cut my budget by 10%, where would I make those cuts?
- What are my 1, 3, and 5-year goals for this company?
If you find some of these questions difficult to answer, consider starting with a simpler SWOT analysis. While not as useful overall as a 5c model, it can be a good starting point to help you get better insights into your company.
It’s also very important to be upfront and honest during this process, especially about your weaknesses and where your competitors are outperforming you. Once you’ve answered these questions, spend a moment and ask yourself how the answers to these questions make you feel. Are there any where you wish you’d been able to answer differently? If so, make a note of what your ideal answer would be – this is a great way to create both short- and long-term goals for your company.
Collaborators ( 02 of 5 Cs of Marketing )
Take a broad look at the collaborators you currently work with as well as investigating the potential for untapped partnerships.
Businesses that are aligned with you in the marketplace, but aren’t direct competitors, may prove to be valuable partners for creating content. Looking forward and backward in your supply chain can be helpful, too. You’ll likely find a lot of opportunities to work with other companies that have shared interests.
Construct a well-defined plan for pursuing partnerships based on your marketing decisions.
In this section, list out any person or service that your company works with in order to operate. Think of it as a directory or phone book for your company – for example, when a supplier is late with an order, you can refer to the collaborators list to quickly figure out who you need to call to get it fixed. For each collaborator, make a note of the primary contact person, their email address, phone number, and other relevant info.
Here are some questions to ask and examples of the collaborators that businesses work with most commonly:
- Who runs the daily operations of the company?
- Do I have a partner that helps run the company?
- Do I have investors or stakeholders?
- Who creates or supplies the products I sell?
- Who is my shipping provider?
- Who processes my credit card payments?
- Who provides my ecommerce platform?
- Who handles my inventory or warehouse operations?
- Who did I register my domain with?
- Do I have anyone helping me create my website?
- Do I have anyone writing product descriptions, articles, or other copy for me?
- Do I have anyone helping me with marketing or advertising?
- Do I work with a photographer on an ongoing basis?
- Do I have anyone distributing or selling my products for me?
- Do I have someone running my social media accounts?
- Do I work with any freelancers or contractors?
- Is there anyone else that I work with on a regular basis?
After filling out the collaborators section, you’ll likely realize that it takes more people (or services) to run your business than you initially realized. Listing all of your collaborators here will help you keep track of who is responsible for what. It also gives you a place to start when you’re looking to make your business more productive or efficient – you may realize that you’ve had a contractor on the payroll that hasn’t emailed you in months.
Customers ( 03 of 5 Cs of Marketing )
One of the most important parts of any business is the customers that purchase your products. By getting a strong sense of who your customers are, what they want, and how well your product meets their needs, you’ll be much more effective in delivering products that your customers want to buy (and keep buying). You’ll also be better prepared when it comes to your marketing efforts – not only will you be promoting your products to the right audience, you’ll also know what language and imagery resonates with your potential customers. Finally, customer analysis is one of the best ways to learn about your products and business – by figuring out what customers like and dislike about your products and business, you’ll be gaining firsthand insight into what matters most. Begin your customer analysis by asking the following questions. If you’re targeting multiple market segments, you may want to answer these questions for each segment:
- What does the ideal customer(s) look like for my products?
- Who is my target audience?
- Who is currently purchasing my products?
- What sorts of products are sold most/least frequently?
- Which of my products have very good reviews? Poor reviews? No reviews?
- How do my customers behave on my website? Which pages do they visit most often?
- How are my customers finding my site or products?
- Is my overall audience growing or shrinking?
- How many repeat purchases do my customers make? How important are repeat purchases to my business model?
- What promotions or campaigns have been most effective in driving sales in the past?
- Is there seasonality or trends in customer purchases?
- Do customers do careful research before purchasing, or do they impulse buy?
- What motivates my customers to purchase? (Price, quality, convenience, unique product benefit, etc.)
- Where does my customer go to get more information about my products?
- What are my channels of communication with my customers?
- What sources of customer feedback do I have available?
- What is the most common customer complaint or issue?
- What is the most common praise or positive feedback?
- What sorts of things do my customers find most interesting? Least interesting?
- If I could only tell my customers one thing about my business, what would it be?
The goal of these questions is to understand your customers, their behaviors, and their underlying motivations. If you’re having difficulty with this section, you’re not alone – the most difficult and important part of marketing is truly understanding the customer. If you crack that puzzle, you’ve obtained a competitor advantage that will be hard for competitors to beat. Use every source of customer feedback at your disposal to help you form your answers to these questions, and make sure to revise your customer analysis frequently as you learn more about them or as your target audience changes.
Competitors( 04 of 5 Cs of Marketing )
Competitors come next because, next to inner peace and a customer-focused mindset, knowing who you’re up against is the real secret to implementing a solid marketing plan and strategy.
Chances are, no matter how strong your differentiators are, your product lines aren’t totally unique in the market. You may already have a strong sense of who your primary competitors are, but keep an open mind and expand your list if necessary.
Then, make sure you know which digital marketing channels your competitors are using and get to know their social media presence.
Understanding your competitors is as important as understanding your own business. Check out our guide to competitor analysis for ecommerce, and then answer the following questions about your competitors:
- Who are your direct competitors?
- Which are my established competitors? Which are new or emerging competitors?
- What do my competitors offer that I don’t?
- What are each of my competitors’ biggest strengths?
- What are each of my competitors’ biggest weaknesses? (Hint – check their product and company reviews)
- What strategies are my competitors using to gain customers?
- Is there anything that my competitors are doing that I cannot?
- Is there anything that my business can do that my competitors cannot?
- What audiences are my competitors targeting?
- What sort of content is each competitor producing?
- What sort of social media presence does each competitor have?
Knowing your competitor’s overall market position, strengths, and weaknesses will give you a huge advantage – after all, you can’t compete effectively if you don’t know who your real opponents are. You’ll probably want to focus on companies similar in size to your own, but it’s OK if your competitors are larger or better-established than you – while it might not seem that way at first, smaller companies have a number of advantages over larger companies. Since they aren’t run by committee or beholden to stakeholders, small companies can be much more agile and inventive in their marketing, which can more than make up for a giant advertising budget. As Sun Tzu says, “If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Rather than trying to go toe-to-toe with larger competitors on the things they’re best at, look for weaknesses, gaps, and other opportunities. The key to beating a larger competitor is to focus on small, attainable wins, and let those accumulate over time.
Climate ( 05 of 5 Cs of Marketing )
Whether you use the term “climate,” “context” or “conditions,” chances are you’re talking about similar concepts here.
The idea is to really look beyond yourself to get a better understanding of the whole ecosystem in which your company participates. To develop an effective strategy that attracts new potential customers while retaining loyal clients, you have to assess the overall climate.
There are two related situation analyses that can help you get there:
- SWOT: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
- PEST: Political, economic, social and technological.
For instance, if you learn that your customers are already becoming overburdened by email in their professional lives, how do you respond to that threat?
(As an added bonus, conducting a PEST analysis, followed by a SWOT analysis, is how to start building out your marketing plan.)
When looking at the climate, focus on factors external to your own business that may affect how your operate. This will include industry trends, societal trends, legal trends, and new or developing technologies. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Are there any new or proposed laws or regulations that may affect my business? If so, how do I plan to address them?
- Are there any social trends that may affect the things that people buy or the way people buy them?
- Are there any economic trends that might affect customer shopping behaviors?
- Are there any new or emerging technolgies that may change the way my customers act or the way my business operates?
- What sorts of things or opinions are becoming popular or unpopular?
With these questions, you’re not trying to predict the future, but you are trying to get a general sense of where the market is headed. For example, when looking into societal trends, consider how people think or feel, and what sorts of things are important to them. For example, if your target audience is becoming increasingly concerned with eco-friendliness, fair trade practices, or country of manufacture, you’ll need to be aware of these feelings. Not only will this help you guide your company towards success, it will also help you avoid potential disasters. A great example of a company failing to predict technological trends is Blockbuster, who famously declined to purchase Netflix in 2000 for $50 million dollars – Blockbuster is now defunct (except for a single remaining store with what might be the world’s best Twitter account), and Netflix is worth almost 4 billion dollars. Had Blockbuster been better-informed about industry trends, they could have achieved an 8,000% profit increase (and still be in business!).
