Marketing Strategies - Essay Example

Running Head: Marketing Strategies Marketing Strategies [Institute’s Marketing Strategies As the human populace has entered into the epoch of twenty first century, the indefinite advancements and progressions has given escalation to utter competition in the world of commerce on top. The entire business community has stepped into the race of competition where the enterprises yearn for providing their customers with the unsurpassed and preeminent products and services in order to have an edge over their competitors. However, in this chase of competition, the approaches and methods with which the organisations loom or come within reach of their customers play a significant part. Here, the marketing personnel of any organisation comes in the picture as a foreground and is the backbone of the business. The way the organisation market its products and services makes a direct impact on to the firm, its suppliers, its customers and all others that come under affection by the firm’s choices. In addition, marketing is another way of building and sustaining enduring relationships between buyers, sellers, and other parties. Creating, communicating, delivering, and exchange offers are few of the courses of actions involved in the process of marketing. Nevertheless, customer has always been the vital and salient entity for the business; therefore, customer value is the prime objective of marketing any product or service. Through marketing, the organisations make sure that the customers get value from the products or services that they are buying so that they can create brand loyalty for their products or services (Mercer, pp. 11-18, 1996). The effective marketing concepts make visible the vision of the marketers that they focus on letting people be acquainted with their products and services and win over them to buy or use it on frequent or recurring basis. Here, the marketing strategy plays a substantial role as it shapes the overall business goals. In addition, the marketing strategy incorporates the business definition, account, or picture of products or services, a silhouette of target customers, and defines the companys role in affiliation to its competitors. Therefore, marketing strategy is a process that the marketers follow as it facilitates the firm in focusing and paying attention to their resources lying on the opportunities. The effective marketing strategy would not only boost the level of sales but could become a leading reason for gaining an edge over the competitors (pp. Pride & Ferrell, pp. 29-30, 2006). As according to the author Seema Gupta, “strategic marketing is best seen as an ongoing and never-ending process” (pp. 145, 2009). The Business Dictionary defines marketing strategy as “A strategy that integrates an organization’s marketing goals into a cohesive whole. Ideally drawn from market research, it focuses on the ideal product mix to achieve maximum profit potential. The marketing strategy is set out in a marketing plan” (BusinessDictionary.com, 2011). To put it in other words, four Ps that take account of product, price, place and promotion are they key aspects that marketing strategies emphasize. Furthermore, these strategies are comparatively high-level plans that are often interactive and dynamic. The marketer values the four Ps of marketing that are product, price, promotion, and place while defining the marketing strategy as it requires the marketing mix with the intention to draw the target markets’ attention towards the product or service. Therefore, the target market symbolises the marketing strategy decisions that encircle the four Ps (Ferrell & Hartline, pp. 263-266, 2010). According to some schools of thoughts, effective marketing strategy is a two-step process that comprise of making a verdict about who matters, and being different. The first step of effective marketing strategy defines that the organisation develops the strategies that classifies a contracted target profile. Moreover, the strategies must come under development that allures and fascinates to the target audience. However, while being different and having a unique selling point with the products or services, the enterprise would be able to differentiate themselves in comparison to the competitors (Ferrell & Hartline, pp. 1-10, 2010). To be different from others is imperative in order to have marketing strategy to be effective. Differentiation is moderately making and portraying the products and services in such a way that the organisation appears to be different, distinctive, inimitable, and far better than what the competitors present or offer. This different feature of the enterprise must be noticeable and obvious by the target audience. This would exert a pull of the customers towards the exclusive facets of the products or service that fulfills the needs of the customers in an exclusive manner (Ferrell & Hartline, pp. 740-750, 2010). While looking at the case of Microsoft, it differentiated itself from its competitors by providing its target audience and customers with a much more user-friendly computers and operating systems as their unique point of sales. Internal and external environments that include marketing mix, performance analysis, customer analysis, competitor analysis, target market analysis, and various other environmental factors come under careful and vigilant examination while defining effective marketing strategies. This is important because the more the marketers plan and implement effective marketing strategies, the likelihood of the success of the products or services increases (Ferrell & Hartline, pp. 90-95, 2010). It has also come under consideration that the marketers can effectively implement their strategies by following few rules and regulations. Having a focus on managing the marketing activities is one of the prime activities that need to be penned down. Additionally, having a track over the initiatives is relatively pivotal. The marketers must set up an accountability system that is another way to track the plans, which provides the basic data such as date, cost, target completion date, results, date completed, and many others. This way the marketers can put the marketing strategies in movement by managing and creating accountability (Hooley & Graham, pp. 29-54, 2008). The marketers with the intention to have effective marketing strategies, they must distinguish their plans that should be specific, precise, and explicit, and communicate accordingly. For instance, increasing market share by ten percent seems to be clear and specific, rather having a strategy like improving profitability, as it seems to be quite vague and unclear. In addition, the strategies must come under development that ensures that the marketing plans are measurable and involve exact numbers or percentages. With the examination of such regulations, the marketers would be in a much better position to implement effective marketing strategies (Hooley & Graham, pp. 29-54, 2008). SWOT analysis that defines the strengths of the organisation and its products or services, the weaknesses that makes the organisation less competent, the opportunities that are present in the marketplace that the enterprise can utilise and turn into their strengths and lastly the threats that comes from the competitors in the market. This SWOT analysis is very crucial and critical for any organisation due to the reason that the effective marketing strategies lay its strong institution on watchful SWOT analysis (Pride & Ferrell, pp. 31-35, 2006). For instance, while looking at Microsoft, its advanced and innovative technology, enormous teams of proficient engineers, a profusion of experience in software designing, immense market share and a valued brand name are few of the qualities and strengths that they possess. While statistics reveal the information that units of MSN have become their weaknesses that is producing loss to them. However, Microsoft with their strength of their brand name pierces and penetrates into the hardware market that is potential opportunity for the Microsoft. Whilst, the weak economy has become a major threat to Microsoft, due to which fewer computers, operating systems, and software packages are off shooting in this period (Bateman, pp. 175-178, 2008). Therefore, the SWOT analysis provides the marketers to utilise and consume its strengths and opportunities in order to overcome their weaknesses and threats. In this case, Microsoft either can allocate more resources for the enhancement of the MSN units or can also desert this unit. Even Microsoft can look into their threats that can become their opportunities and then their strengths. Market segmentation, defining target market and positioning is another very essential and influential aspect that facilitates the marketers to great extent in defining and implementing effective marketing strategies. By having a comprehensive and extensive market research with relation to the customers present in the market, the marketers are in a position to determine the types of customers that exist in the market. This research would help to identify and classify the meaningful diverse and assorted groups of customers through segmentation. Furthermore, the market segmentation also allows the enterprises to learn about what kind of customers exists with different needs (McDonald & Dunbar, pp. 48-58, 2004). For case in point, in the field of technology, Microsoft has a gain over others as they produce and present with software that are easy to handle, user-friendly and less expensive as these are few of the variables that categorise the customers. However, in the process of targeting the customers, the marketers, and companies gets the opportunity to select and target the segments of the customers, which best suits with their products and services. Moreover, it is also important to determine that how well the segments come under serving by other competitors. This provides the enterprise with an idea about how to make the product or service more striking and eye-catching that can attract the same segment. Lastly, the positioning is the process of implementation of the targeting (Lamb & Hair & McDaniel, pp. 259-280, 2011). For exemplar, Microsoft has positioned itself as an architect of user-friendly and less-expensive computers. Thus, Microsoft has promoted itself largely through its advertising, and unintimidating icons. The widespread and extensive researches also present with the point of view that consumer buying behaviors and patterns play an important part that can come under consideration while determining, developing, and implementing marketing strategies. This is because; consumer-buying behavior is generally a psychological process that involves recognition of their needs, finding ways and alternatives to fulfill those needs, coming up to a decision of buying, interpreting the purchased product or service and actual purchase of the product or service (Wright, pp. 4-15, 2006). Due to this reason, the marketers must be fully aware of what are the buying patterns of the customers that they target for, as it would be of great assistance to them for the development of effective marketing strategies that can distinct them from the competitors and allure the customers (Hoyer & Macinnis, pp. 16-20, 2009). Since physical factor is also one of the primary facets that can be a source of appeal. At the same time as taking the example of Microsoft, it is important to find out what the customers look for while they want to have computers. In this time of recession, people generally look for less expensive products that they can leverage with coupled to less expensive service charges in case if something goes wrong. In addition, user-friendly is another noteworthy feature that Microsoft can use of in influencing and attracting the customers. The promotion of the product is reasonably and undoubtedly salient and preeminent. The promotion depends upon how the marketing strategies have come under development. With proper, accurate, and precise marketing strategies, the marketers are in a better situation to promote and market the product or service. This is because the marketers’ predominant aim of advertising or promotion of the product or service is to have a change in customer’s attitude. Besides, the consumer’s attitude toward a product reflects his or her beliefs, feeling, and purchase intentions for a particular product (Cravens, pp. 355-358, 2009). Competitive advantage has come under reflection by the marketers as a source for escalating the profit margins for survivals. In other words, it is an advantage in the form of marketing mix that the customers view better over the competitors’ mix. It is a consequence of innovative research and development, reduction in production costs, more efficient purchasing of required components and few others. Therefore, while planning marketing strategy for any product, it becomes indispensable to take into account the competitive advantage of the organisation (McDonald & Mouncey, pp. 217-219, 2011). From the above literature review, it can come succinctly to conclusion that defining and implementing effective marketing strategy is one of the most compelling and powerful tool that can lead the organisation reach heights of success. However, various attributes contribute to the development of the marketing strategy for a particular product or service that include SWTO analysis, segmentation, positioning, competitive analysis and quite a few others that has been a considerable part of the discussion.   References Bateman. 2008. Management 8E (Sie). Tata McGraw-Hill Education. BusinessDictionary.com. 2011. Marketing Strategy - Definition. Retrieved on December 03, 2011: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/marketing-strategy.html Carevans. 2009. Strategic Marketing 8E. Tata McGraw-Hill Education. Ferrell, O. C. & Hartline, Michael. 2010. Marketing Strategy. Cengage Learning. Gupta, Seema. 2009. Branding and Advertising. Global India Publications. Hooley & Graham Hooley. 2008. Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning. Pearson Education India. Hoyer, Wayne D. & Macinnis, Deborah J. 2009. Consumer Behavior. Cengage Learning. Lamb, Charles W. & Hair, Joseph F. & McDaniel, Carl. 2011. Essentials of Marketing. Cengage Learning. McDonald, Malcolm & Dunbar, Ian. 2004. Market segmentation: how to do it, how to profit from it. Butterworth-Heinemann. McDonald, Malcolm & Mouncey, Peter. 2011. Marketing Accountability: A New Metrics Model to Measure Marketing Effectiveness. Kogan Page Publishers. Mercer, David. 1996. Marketing. Wiley-Blackwell. Pride, William M., & Ferrell, O. C. 2006. Marketing: concepts and strategies. Cengage Learning. Wright, Ray. 2006. Consumer Behavior. Cengage Learning EMEA. Read More