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Small Business Marketing Overview
Traditionally, Marketing has been a term applied to the craft of linking the producers (or potential producers) of a product or service with customers, both existing and potential.
This general definition fails to provide any direction to someone hoping to market their products or services effectively.
With that, a more modern explanation of what marketing is--and what makes it effective--is a definition coined by marketing researcher and author Brian Norris.
Marketing is a four step process:
Marketing Step One:Marketing begins with analyzing and defining a qualified universe of potential users or buyers.
Marketing Step Two:
After this first phase in the marketing process, a true marketing effort succeeds in capturing the attention of the intended buyers within the targeted universe.
Marketing Step Three:
Third, systematic effort must be put into getting the prospects to accept the concepts or propositions being offered via the marketing effort.
Marketing Step Four:
Finally, with all three of the previous steps achieved, the marketer must convert the prospective buyer into an actual buyer by getting them to take the desired action (purchase, rent, call, download, subscribe, refer, sell, follow the law, become a member, etc.).
Marketing methods are informed by many of the social sciences, particularly
psychology, sociology, and economics. Marketing
research underpins these activities. Through advertising,
it is also related to many of the creative arts.
Product, price, promotion, and placement
What marketing involves
In popular usage, the term 'marketing' refers to the promotion of products,
especially advertising and branding.
However, in professional usage the term has a wider meaning that recognized that marketing is customer centered. Products are often developed to meet the desires of groups of customers or even, in some cases, for specific customers.
McCarthy divided marketing into four general sets of activities. His typology has become so universally recognized that his four activity sets, the Four Ps, have passed into the language.
The 4 Ps are:
- Product - The product
management aspect of marketing deals with the specifications of
the actual good or service, and how it relates to the end-user's needs
and wants.
- Pricing - This refers to the process
of setting a price for a product, including discounts.
- Promotion - This includes advertising,
publicity, word of mouth, and personal selling, and refers to the various
methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.
- Place or distribution refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point of sale placement or retailing.
These four elements are often referred to as the marketing
mix. A marketer will use these variables to craft a marketing
plan.
The four Ps model is most useful when marketing low value consumer products.
Industrial products, services, and high value consumer products require adjustments to this model.
Services marketing must account for the unique nature of services.
Industrial or b2b marketing must account for the long term contractual agreements that are typical in supply chain transactions. Relationship marketing attempts to do this by looking at marketing from a long term relationship perspective rather than individual transactions.
Technique
For a marketing plan to be successful, the mix of the four "p's" must reflect the wants and desires of the consumers in the target market.
Trying to convince a market segment to buy something they don't want is extremely expensive and seldom successful.
Marketers depend on marketing research to determine what consumers want and what they are willing to pay for. Marketers hope that this process will give them a sustainable competitive advantage.
Marketing management is the practical application of this process.
Most companies today have a customer orientation (also called customer focus). This implys that the company focuses its activities and products on customer needs.
Generally there are two ways of doing this:
- Customer-driven approach
- Product innovation approach
In the consumer-driven approach consumer wants are the drivers of all strategic marketing decisions. No strategy is pursued until it passes the test of consumer research.
Every aspect of a market offering, including the nature of the product itself, is driven by the needs of potential consumers. The starting point is always the consumer.
The rational for this approach is that there is no point spending R&D funds developing products that people will not buy.
History attests to many products that were commercial failures inspite of being technological breakthroughs.
In a product innovation approach, the company pursues product innovation, then tries to develop a market for the product. Product innovation drives the process and marketing research is conducted primarily to ensure that a profitable market segment(s) exists for the innovation.
The rational is that customers may not know what options will be available to them in the future so we should not expect them to tell us what they will buy in the future.
It is claimed that if Edison depended on marketing research he would have produced larger candles rather than inventing light bulbs. Many firms, such as research and development focused companies, successfully focus on product innovation.
Many purists doubt whether this is really a form of marketing orientation at all, because of the ex post status of consumer research. Some even question whether it is marketing.
Diffusion of innovations research explores how and why people adopt new products, services and ideas.
A new form of marketing uses the Internet and is called internet marketing or more generally e-marketing.
It typically tries to perfect the segmentation strategy used in traditional marketing. It targets its audience more precisely, and is sometimes called personalized marketing or one-to-one marketing.
Some aspects of marketing, especially promotion, are the subject of criticisms.
This article has been adapted from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
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