Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

The definition of marketing includes the later: market segments , needs , wants , demands , value , exchange , communication channels and their types. Just talking about marketing mix or the marketing communications part would be an incomplete treatment of the science. Here is a definition of marketing from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing

When I prescribe to someone that they need to do their marketing, I give them this outline:

Understand the market

• How big is the market (revenue, units, average selling price)?


• Who are the customers?


• What are their needs?


• How can you segment these customers by needs and/or demograhics and how big is each segment?


• How can you best reach these customers (what media, what message, etc)?


• What are the best sales channels to use to reach these customers - retailers, wholesalers, distributors? Map this out

Understand the competition

• Who are the competitors?


• What share does each of the competitors have or what segments


• What are the strenghts and weaknesses of each competitor?


• How well does each of the competitors meet the needs of the customers (by segment)

Understand your company

• Conduct a SWOT - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your company


• Comparing your SWOT versus the competitive analysis, how can you use your strengths to attack the competitors' weakneses, how can you turn your weaknesses into strenghts, how can you take advantage of the opportunities, and how can you avoid the threats?


• How can you position your product/service to better meet the customers needs versus the competition?


• For which segments do you have the best compelling unique selling point? Also, what are the pricing needs for each based on the value you bring to the customers?

Branding
The brand you want to create involves much:

• Name


• Logo


• Product characteristics - colors, features, quality


• packaging and packaging characteristics (colors, font styling, logo and logo placement)


• tag lines

When you have completed your marketing and made your branding decisions, then it's time to put together a plan to reach these customers with a message that will influence them to understand how your company can serve their needs better than the competition. This involves advertising, press releases, preparing collateral material, training salesmen (if you have them), etc. The plans should take into account different approaches for different segments. Therefore, you want to plan your attack, since you probably can't afford to do everything at once! Pick a "segment" to go after - based on geography, customer characteristics, etc. The ideal segment also would be one that leads easily to another segment because this set of customers influences another set. When you're done planning how to attack that segment, plan the next and the next. For each segment, you have to identify the key customers and prioritizing which customer to go after first, second, etc. Again, take into account those influencer customers to whom the rest of the market looks for new trends. Capturing them means the first step in capturing the market segment.

This summarized the concepts of marketing

Hope this helps.

Wayde

Your question is not easy and can have many answers that can offer few bits of info. Here is something:

You should start with the marketing mix, that 4P's-Product,Price,Place,Promotion and then to develop every component. Just like the branches of a tree. When you consider the 4P's you should see both views-internal and external environments. In this way you can see your company/products and the competition companies/products.
For example-in an upper response it is said Branding; well brand/branding is a part of Promotion from the Marketing Mix (Product-Price-Place-Promotion) and not just a part of the marketing mix somewhere in the air.
In analysing marketing environment it is good to use the SWOT tool : Strengths and Weaknesses for your company then Opportunities and Threaths for external environment.
In considering the external environment you can use the STEEP tool-Social-Technological-Ecological-Economical-political factors.
Then your objectives should be SMART-Specific-Measurable-Achievable-Relevant-Time bound.


Best wishes,
Marian