My Profile
Active Members
TodayLast 7 Days
more...
Awards & Gifts
Online Exams
Fresher Jobs
Our fresher job section is exclusively for fresh graduates! Find jobs for freshers in major Indian
cities including Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune or Kochi
Resources
Find educational articles, blogs, discussion threads and other resources.
Colleges
Find details about any college in India or search for courses.
|
Resources » Articles/Knowledge Sharing » Education »
Marketing - Marketing Strategy & How Strategic Marketing Develop
|
Marketing
The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) in the UK puts this as:
The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably
Philip Kotler calls it
A social and managerial process by which individuals and organisations obtain what they need through creating and exchanging products and value with others
These definitions are firmly based on the notion that there are two parts to every market - Sellers and Buyers. Each of these participants has their own needs - which appear to be contradictory. Marketing sets out to ensure that both the seller and the buyer are satisfied with the exchange they make. Some writers even suggest that we should be seeking to "delight" both the seller and the buyer and that mere satisfaction is not enough.
For a private sector company, making a profit is the ‘need’; for a non-profit making organisation it is fulfilling its aims within its budget.
It is important to remember that consumers can be delighted by getting something that is exactly what they wanted or needed. This represents "value for money" and may delight the customer more than something less suitable bought at a "bargain" price. It is, therefore, possible to delight both the seller – in financial terms, and the buyer - by providing exactly what is required.
Is Marketing different to selling?
We can sum up the processes contained in the CIM definition above as "getting close to the customer". This requires a detailed understanding of the whole market as a changing situation, and all of the things that influence consumers. To gain this understanding we must begin marketing activities a long while before the selling activity takes place.
John Frain has described marketing as:
"More about buying than selling"
This is because we aim to focus our business on the things, which motivate the buyer, rather than those which are of interest to us as a seller.
Peter Drucker goes further:
"The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous"
He is implying that if we match what we offer closely to what consumers want to buy then we do not have to persuade them, so there is no need to "sell".
According to the American Marketing Association:
Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organisational objectives.
Marketing Strategy and other strategies
We can describe firms which have not fully embraced a market centred approach as ‘product centred’.
Product Centred strategies may be identified by the following characteristics:
• They take a long term view
• They produce unbranded goods
• They produce goods for other firms rather than consumers
• They are concerned about technical quality
• They stress quality, tradition, workmanship
• Price is the cost of production plus a profit margin
Market Centred strategies are more likely to have the following:
• They take a short term view
• They are selling consumer goods
• Low cost production is important
• "Quality" is what the customer is happy with
• Price is what customer will pay
It may appear that some of the aspects of product centred firms are desirable. In the real world many famous firms which stressed technical quality and tradition have either gone out of business or been taken over because they could not make a profit. We may think that in the UK The Independent is a "better" newspaper than The Sun, but the latter in readership and profits considerably outperforms the former. Which of the two is the most market focussed, and which is the most product focussed? A quick glance at a news stand will show that The Sun is entirely market focussed – with a front page that often has no news at all.
Advantages of having a marketing strategy as opposed to a product strategy
Market focussed firms are able to see the market from the customers' perspective. This includes being aware of what competitors are doing, and knowing who the real competitors are.
Product focussed firms see the market from their own perspective. A bus company would see themselves as being in the bus market, rather than the transport market, and only attempt to compete with bus companies - customers buy the benefit of transport, not the product.
Market focussed firms are aware of changes in consumer attitudes, as well as changes in their real competitors and anticipate future changes. The Chief Executive of Harley Davidson once described the company's real competition as being Caribbean holidays and conservatories, rather than Honda and Suzuki.
A product focussed firm will continue to provide the same thing long after consumer tastes and needs have changed. They will try harder and harder to sell their products, and blame poor results on "difficult trading circumstances".
Market focussed firms keep costs down and deliver a level of quality that satisfies the customer.
Product focussed firms may "over engineer" a product, leading to unnecessary costs. This was true of the UK electricity supply industry before privatisation when the primary objective was to keep the electricity flowing The best quality components were purchased rather than those which would do the job for the least cost.
How did strategic marketing develop
The move to firms becoming market focussed has not happened overnight. Until the early twentieth century product focussed firms were inventing exciting new things with new technology and had little difficulty selling them to increasingly wealthy consumers.
The depression of the 1920s forced firms to work harder as demand fell. Many firms had to close down. Those who survived had to understand the market and differentiate themselves from each other to attract consumers. Branding emerged, but the emphasis was still on selling.
After the Second World War a rise in consumers' incomes and rapid changes in the way people lived led to increased interest in the consumers themselves. This was especially important for firms selling fast moving consumer goods and products affected by fashion
By the 1980s, interest in marketing was becoming widespread among every kind of firm, and even into the non-profit sector. Since the 1990s, there has been a shift towards considering wider, long-term needs as well as the immediate satisfaction of the buyer and seller.
|
Responses
|
No responses found. Be the first to respond and make money from revenue sharing program.
|
|
Advertise Here
|