Hack:
What's Three-Tier Marketing

According to Alderfer's ERG theory, every one has three levels of bottom-up needs, namely, existence needs, relatedness needs, and growth needs.

How to meet people’ three levels of bottom-up needs from the perspective of marketing management? I think the best way to do it is three-tier marketing.

What are three tiers of marketing? They are respectively function marketing, relationship marketing, and innovation marketing.

What is three-tier marketing? It is the integration of three tiers of marketing.

At the bottom of three-tier marketing is function marketing which is designed to meet consumers’ existence needs.

Function marketing usually focuses on how companies can effectively communicate with consumers on what features their goods have, what benefits to meet existence needs consumers will gain via buying them, how cheap their goods are, and the like.

In the middle of three-tier marketing is relationship marketing which is designed to meet consumers’ relatedness needs.

Relationship marketing usually focuses on how companies can effectively communicate with consumers on what emotional meaning their goods include, what emotional feeling consumers will gain in using them, how important such goods are for consumers to show love towards their family and friends, and so on. 

It should be noted that consumers’ emotional needs are complex. If love is the only expression in marketing and advertising, such relationship marketing would be quite boring and failing.

On the top of three-tier marketing is innovation marketing which is designed to meet consumers’ growth needs.

Innovation marketing usually focuses on how companies can effectively communicate with consumers on how cool and distinctive their goods look like, what new feature their goods have, how important such goods are for consumers to represent their unique trait, and so forth.

These days, Apple in the Steve Jobs era can be viewed as the example of innovation marketing. Its most important way to win consumers is to innovate faster than others. Continuous innovation requires that companies must have a solid foundation of management of innovation, so three-tier marketing is linked together with three-tier management.

As with three-tier management, three tiers of marketing are also an indivisible whole. One of three tiers of marketing alone—whether function marketing, or relationship marketing, or innovation marketing—will not be able to bring high degree of satisfaction on Alderfer's three levels of needs to consumers. Only the smooth integration of three tiers of marketing can do so.