Marketing as a Livelihood of Any Business - Assignment Example

Introduction Marketing is the livelihood of any business. A new business or an already up and running business will always rely on marketing to get to the consumers. Marketing comes out of a simple cycle. When you need your business to grow, you need money. So as to get money, you need customers who will pay for your products. It is therefore almost mandatory to make the customers know about you product and that’s where marketing comes in. it is never enough to just produce any service or product, you must market it in order to get returns. The customer is the most important person in any business and therefore attracting them is no expense, luxury or something that we claim that we cannot afford or can. To the contrary, marketing is a financial investment with the customers being the Return on investment and is also a time investment where you only spend on it after learning well about your market (Grewal & Levy, 2010). Discussion Marketing Mix In launching of a new product there a number of things that is vital to start with. You need to learn about the products or services chain and who the competitors are. This means you need to take a good market research in the industry which will help you determine whether the idea is viable. It will also help you identify your target market, analyse it and your capabilities. While researching, you could ask direct questions from the consumers or you could take your own research from existing information. Communication is a vital part of marketing as without it customers will just be aware but will actually not buy. You should have a unique selling proposition, unique features and benefits and a marketing message with a great image. You should be daring to be different. When you stand out and do things differently to attract attention and dare to go beyond any other business in your product or service line, you will definitely launch and sell your product or service with an agility you never imagined. In Claudio Vignali’s article, ‘McDonald’s: “think global, act local”-the marketing mix’, the author takes us on a journey of how the McDonald’s restaurants were established and how they came to grow through market mixing. After founding the restaurant in1937, the brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald were later joined by Ray Kroc, a milk-shake salesman giving him exclusive rights in 1954. The success made it rise in worth to become one of the greatest companies in the world’s history. The key to its international success according to the author was the use of franchising. They franchised to local people making a US brand culture and with its 20,000 restaurants in over 100 countries, 80% are franchises. Globalisation, according to the author, is developing marketing strategies looking at the world as a single entity where standardised products are sold the same way everywhere while internationalism is customizing marketing strategies for different parts of the world due to differences in regions and cultures (Vignali, 2001). The marketing mix introduced by McCarthy in 1975 of 4Ps has been the foundation of marketing for many years. It has however been improved by theorists into 7Ps which the author has used to analyse the marketing mix of the McDonald’s. The first P represents the Product whose features, qualities and quantities are the same all over the globe. The second P is the Place which is basically the location and the number of outlets. The third P, Price represents the strategies, determinants and levels which affect the prices of a certain place. The fourth P, Promotion stands for the advertisement, public relations and sales promotion. The other one represents the People’s or employees’ quality, quantity, training and promotion. The other P resents the Processes in which business is carried while the last P is for the Physical representations of the business which include décor, cleanliness and ambience of the service. In Christian Gronroos article, ‘from marketing mix to relationship marketing: towards a paradigm shift in marketing’, the author introduces us to relationship marketing claiming that there is a paradigm shift underway. He says that the 4Ps or marketing mix has been passed by time claiming that the perception of the fundamentals of marketing is changing. Marketing mix makes marketing seem too easy to handle according to him. He says that the use of this marketing mix and the four Ps makes it difficult for the marketing function to earn credibility. He protects relationship marketing and other contemporary models that they include the management and other subordinates in the marketing which marketing mix does not. The examples of contemporary theories of marketing are interaction/network approach to industrial marketing and marketing of services (Groonroos, 2005). Marketing mix will however always plays a very crucial role in the decisions of strategies in an organization. It will always be the first step in any business plan or marketing plan. It will also go hand in hand with the decisions of segmentation, targeting and positioning in a business. In the Principles of Marketing, a book by Philip Kotler and Gary Armstrong, the first P which is the product is broken down into several forms in which include convenience goods, shopping goods, speciality goods and new goods. The authors go ahead and break down the product decisions into risk choices, differentiation, competitive response, ideas and evaluations and most importantly branding and brand extensions (Kotler & Armsrong, 2012). Branding will always affect the consumers’ preference in a new product. According to John w. Cadogan in his book, Marketing Strategy, most great companies have made it due to their special kinds of branding. When launching a new product, during product decisions, one should choose a good brand for it will decide on the pricing of the product. It will also affect the place you sell it and moreover the way that you promote it in the future. Branding therefore affects all the four Ps in the marketing mix. While it is easier to launch and advertise these days due to the internet and the media, some products will have to be advertised in the streets through the word of mouth and posters. It is easy to advertise some products in the modern ways but the products advertised in the traditional ways always do better due to being easily noticeable even by the people not interested in the media and internet (Cadogan, 2009). Application of Marketing Mix The four Ps in the market mix have always been used successfully by big and small companies to launch new products successfully. An example of such companies is Beiersdorf, the producers of NIVEA. The company which was founded in 1882 has become a renowned global company specialising in beauty and skin care ( Grant,2000). Skin and beauty care products need a lot of marketing as a company need to make sure that their products is close as possible to the consumers no matter the place they live. A company also needs to understand the market trends, the consumers and delight them with their needs. To become one of the biggest skin and beauty care brands in the globe Beiersdorf had to follow these and also strengthened the trust and appeal of their products. Many beauty and care products customers in the globe will prefer NIVEA to other products due to the trust surrounding it. In 2007, the company re-launched NIVEA VISAGE which was earlier launched in 2005 for ladies aged 13 to 19. Through optimisation, the product had a new formula, new design, new name and new packaging. The product was improved and made more consumer friendly. NIVEA VISAGE Young, the new product targeted girls who did not prefer the competitor products which always advertised on medicated solutions (Hill, 2013). After a market research, the company discovered that most girls preferred beautifying products rather than medicated products which were only problem focussed. They listened to consumers directly, gathered data through different research techniques and also tested the products in different markets. Their competitive advantage was that they did not offer solutions to certain skin problems but were focussed on beautifying their product users, a capturing news to the teenagers. The product was also packaged and made from natural products thus corporate responsible. They used larger pack recyclable plastic and included minerals and sea salts in their product. The Price, was affected by the cost of production, how to attract customers to buy and the need to maximise profits and sales. The company made the re-launch‘s price higher than the previously launched product. This clearly showed that the new product was better than the first one in formulations, product range and packaging. The products market however was teenage girls and therefore the company had to consider that most of them had no income. This meant that the price had to be pocket friendly to the girls and for the parents buying the product for their daughters. By doing this, they were guaranteed to stay in reach of their target market. The company then sold the products to retailers at the same price but gave them freedom to alter the prices depending on the kind of promotions they had. A retailer could sell at a little loss to attract large volumes of sales or offer discounts to attract more customers. The Place, to them referred to where the product was to be sold and also the distribution strategies or how the product would arrive to the point of sale. They focussed on the where consumers would expect to find skin and beauty products and therefore focussed on supermarkets and large high street shops. The supermarkets were especially important due to the shopping mums who would want to buy beauty products for their daughters whereas high street shops are full of teenage girls and their mothers. Their distribution was wholesaler preferred and in bulk so as to save transport costs. Promotion, for them was both above the line where they directly paid for advisements in the magazines like FYI and other media channels and below the line where they used other promotional methods to get the consumers to know about the product. They used trade fairs and events which helped in launching the product to wide audiences. They also engaged in sponsorships of different occasions where the goers would notice their product advertisement. The company also engaged in charity events as well as participated in donations where the product was the donator. They also created samples which allowed the consumer to try the product. The product promoters also used the social media like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace where they made a lot of teenagers aware of their product. The balancing of the four elements of marketing mix which include product, price, place and promotion is clearly shown in the re-launch of NIVEA VISAGE Young. The company mixes both traditional and modern methods by distributing through the high streets while still advertising in the social media where they know most of their target market will be found. This makes it easy for them reach the right market in the right way while making it easier for the consumers to trust and connect with their product. The recommendations for the company above are to make more use of the internet. The company does not sell online citing it as not cost friendly due to small amounts of sales. Most shoppers these days do their shopping online and therefore the company is losing a lot of potential business. The company should also be prepared to re-launch since launching of such products never ends. When the competitors come with better options, the consumers will most likely go for them. They should continuously improve their products, their advertisements so as to prevent their products from losing momentum in the market or stalling out. The company should also launch different kinds of the same product focussing on the different kind of colour skins so as to penetrate all the markets globally. Conclusion Marketing will always help any business in defining the marketing elements in order to successfully position their market offer. Any business wishing to increase its ROI should employ market mix and not listen to those dispelling it and calling it a myth. Market mix is the only transparent approach of marketing and only for those ready to invest their time and effort in creating a great product. References Grewal, D & Levy, M 2010, Marketing, Boston: McGraw-Hill Irwin. Grönroos, C 2005, From marketing mix to relationship marketing : towards a paradigm shift in marketing: Sage Library in Business and Management. 2, 217. Vignali, C 2001, McDonalds: "think global, act local" the marketing mix:British Food Journal. 103, 97-111. Hill, M E 2013, Marketing strategy: the thinking involved. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications. Grant, T 2000, International directory of company histories. Volume 29 Volume 29. Detroit, Mich, St. James Press. Read More