Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

When you say "systemhouses" - are these companies that provide the actual selling of your product (often adding some form of value for the end customer by modifying your product or bundling it with other products)?

If this is the case, the systemhouses can do marketing and bring in enough sales for your company, so your company may be fine as such. Your company would do marketing to bring in additional systemhouses, if it wanted to grow through having additional systemhouses?

I do suspect your company does do some marketing, but you may not be thinking of it as such. Marketing is more than advertising - it is often broken down into the 4-Ps (product, price, place, and promotion). Here is a simple description:

- Product is what you sell, and marketing's involvement is providing customer input so that the product can be changed to meet customer needs.

- Price is the price it is sold at. I am sure your company had some say in this.

- Place - this is how you sell (in your case, the decision to sell through systemhouses instead of direct).

- Promotion - this is the advertising and such, which it sounds like you don't do much of.

Of course, adding additional marketing could help grow the company more. For example, you could use a 'pull' prograqm of advertising directly to the end user. This is trying to get them to want the product more (pulling it from the systemhouses). The opposite is a push program, where you work with the systemhouses on their marketing to get them to push the product more into the market.