The Marketing Management - Essay Example

Marketing management process involves a number of activities. Marketing Research is one of the key activities performed to identify target markets or find latent needs of the customers. New product development involves various steps from idea generation to commercialization of a new product. This is followed by branding and packaging activities where the appearance and aesthetics of the product are taken care of. Distribution involves deciding the right mode and channels of selling and managing the product supply chain. Promotion involves marketing advertising, communication, sales promotion and maintaining public relations. Pricing involves deciding the right price on the basis of competition and desired margins. Besides, planning marketing strategy is an overriding function of marketing management where planning for various marketing activities is done in accordance with organizational goals. 2. Developing a new product generally involves seven steps. The first step is the idea generation where the idea may be regarding a new innovation or customization of an existing product to new market, target segment or geography. The second step is screening where useful ideas are shortlisted from a large number of ideas. In the third step, the testing of the idea or concept is performed. Fourth step involves financial and technical analysis of the prospective product. The fifth step is the actual development or design of the new product. In the next step, test marketing is done on a focus group or selected markets. The last step is the commercialization of the product which is also called Go to Market. 3. The product life cycle shows the path of a product in an industry through 4 stages. Consider the example of an electronic product such as a mobile phone. A new mobile phone is introduced into the market in its first stage with a lot of marketing hype to make it attractive to customers. As customers buy it and realize its benefits, more customers buy the mobile phone leading the product towards a growth stage. After the product sales reach a peak, it is no longer very attractive to customers because of introduction of new advanced products and technologies by competitors. The product reaches a maturity stage. Finally, the mobile phone is no longer attractive to customers. Its features become obsolete. It reaches a decline stage and is phased out of the market. 4. An organization can primarily use 4 promotional methods in its promotion mix. Advertising involves non-personal communication through mass media. For example, advertisement of a soap over TV. Personal selling is aimed at informing and convincing customers personally to buy products. For example, Sales representatives selling credit cards. Public relations include maintaining indirect relations with customers through useful sources such as favorable articles in newspapers. Sales promotion contains activities such as providing incentives and gift vouchers to boost sales. 5. While creating an advertising campaign, the company firstly needs to identify the target audience. Secondly, the company must decide the quantifiable objectives to be conveyed to the prospective customers as a result of the campaign. Thirdly, the organization must create the advertising platform containing issues important to both company and the customers. Thereafter, the organization needs to decide the money to be spent and the media forms to be used. Lastly, the company must decide how to measure the advertising effectiveness. 6. Public relations are a set of communication steps taken by an organization to maintain a healthy relationship between itself and its various stakeholders. A company can reach almost anyone through public relations. For example, a positive newspaper article describing the efficient manufacturing process in a steel factory can go a long way in establish good relations with customers, shareholders, government, environmental regulatory agencies, NGOs, suppliers and so on. 7. The competition between two or more firms is said to be price competition when the price of their products is the only competing factor while other factors are more or less the same. For example, large retail organizations such as Wal-Mart believe in price competition. Price competition works best for commodities. When the products of two or more firms in an industry can be differentiated on the basis of other factors such as quality, speed of delivery, technology used etc., it leads to non-price competition. Technology firms such as Apple compete on the basis of non-price competition. 8. An organization’s realized strategy is often not the same as its intended strategy. One has to understand that the intended strategy is nothing but a plan based on certain organizational objectives and assumptions about the future. However, in practice a number of hindrances and constraints come along the way making it difficult to realize the intended strategy. For example, in product development of a new car, an organization intends to manufacture a low cost car with a certain price range in mind. However, during the course of manufacturing, the prices of raw materials may suddenly shoot up due to worsened economic conditions making it impossible to make a profitable car at the intended price. Hence, the realized product would be different from intended one. Similarly, an advertisement campaign may have been intended to increase sales to 1.5 times but the censor board may find the campaign to be misleading and may censor it. This would lead to waste of money and may even cause a drop in sales due to negative publicity. However, the gap analysis between intended and realized strategies can be used to make amends in the future. 9. E-Marketing is a widely used tool for building relationships with stakeholders and increasing customer loyalty. Most of the large organizations today have E-Marketing portals which allow both the promotion and sales of products online. Many companies use platforms such as Google Ad-sense to advertise their products based on consumer searches. Similarly, web analytics tools allow marketers to keep track of customer activity on E-marketing portals. These tools save search history of the customers and take them to their preferred locations next time they login. As a result of effective E-Marketing, customers get used to a certain way of doing things and prefer not to learn new ways of doing the same on competitor sites. Thus, there is a perceived switching cost in the minds of the customers increasing their brand loyalty. 10. Marketers can make efficient use of Internet to improve the product element of the marketing mix. Internet can help generate a lot of product ideas or help understand the characteristics of new target markets, segments and countries through secondary research. Software packages and tools available on Internet can help in the technical and cost benefit analysis of various concepts to allow faster processing and less time to market. Internet can help the organization to be aware of the similar products being developed by competitors and allow them to garner first mover advantage. Also, Internet provides access to new procedures and technologies which can be used for better product development. Tools available on internet such as CAD-Cam are widely used for product design. Read More