Setting/Developing Marketing Capability - Research Paper Example

Setting/Developing Marketing Capability Table of Contents Introduction 4 Critical review of key literature 5 Marketing Audit: An introduction 5 Marketing Audit Process 5 Objective setting and scope 5 Gathering the Data and Analysis 6 Project Report Preparation 6 Marketing Environment analysis 6 7 External Environmental Factors 7 Internal Environmental Factors 8 Electronic Marketing and Data mining 8 Corporate Social Responsibility 9 Illustrative examples 10 Marketing Audit of Parks department 10 Macro Environment Analysis 10 Micro Environment analysis through SWOT 11 Marketing objectives and Targets 11 Objectives 11 Targets 12 Recommended Marketing strategy based on marketing mix 12 Product/Service 12 Price 13 Place 13 Promotion 13 Control Mechanism 13 References 14 Bibliography 15 Introduction The ever growing complexities of the present business environment call for a more a systematic evaluation procedure to analyze the importance of the effectiveness of the marketing activities of an organization in the modern dynamic environment. Marketing audit can be described as comprehensive, systematic and independent approach that can help the managers towards the achievement of organizational objectives. A study on marketing audit would provide some in-depth insights to the perception of the management towards the probable benefits of a marketing audit. Marketing audit allows the managers to find out the problem and makes the marketers understand as to what exactly the organization is trying to achieve. Overall marketing audit makes strong contribution to increase the overall ROI of company. The present study looks to analyze the various components of an ideal marketing audit system which includes external and internal analysis, contribution of the marketing audit towards the understanding of the business environments; the study also shows practical implications of marketing audit system to understand as to how an organization can adapt to the changing business environment and improve overall marketing activities to achieve the desired marketing objectives. Various theoretical and analytic models relevant to the overall marketing audit system of organization such as the PEST analysis, SWOT analysis, Marketing mix strategy has been used to ensure that the study is in depth and analytical nature (Henry, 2008, p. 89). Critical review of key literature Marketing Audit: An introduction Marketing audit is usually an accepted method of evaluation and have treated mainly as a control mechanism of the marketing activities of a company. Kotler defined marketing audit as a self administered method to indentify and improve the utilization of marketing resources. Marketing audit makes a marketer understand a product or a service a lot better; Marketing audit helps a marketer to understand the objective of the overall marketing program; It helps a marketer to adapt to different situations; Marketing audit uncovers the hidden inefficiencies and most importantly marketing audit helps the marketers to assess the gap between the planned and actual results (Kolb, 2008, p. 92). Marketing Audit Process Marketing audit usually is a three step process as shown in the figure Objective setting and scope The first step usually includes a meeting between the officers and an auditor. The auditor selected is usually an external and independent company to get a more in depth and yet independent view. If the officers are company management team is convinced about the proposed benefits of the marketing audit then the audit team has to get into an agreement regarding the objectives, coverage, depth, data sources and time period of the audit (Brown, 2009, p. 209). Gathering the Data and Analysis This happens to be one of the most important phases. Majority of the time of the auditor is spent on the collection of data. It may look like that auditor is single person, but actually marketing audit as mentioned before is conducted by a team or an organization. Once the data is collected the data are to be analyzed by the marketing audit team for the final decision making. Project Report Preparation In this last phase the auditor would develop the final report and would draw conclusions to provide an overview of the overall marketing activities. Also the auditor would provide recommendations as to how the organization can improve the overall marketing activities. Marketing Environment analysis Business does not happen in vacuum. The marketing environment consists of internal and external forces which directly or in directly affect the organization. Changes in the environmental forces create opportunities or threats for the organization. There are mainly two types of marketing environment: External or Macro and Internal or Micro environmental forces (Czinzota, Ronkainen, Moffett, Marinova & Marinov, 2009, pp. 423-429). External Environmental Factors The external or macro environmental forces are uncontrollable factors which influence the decision making of an organization. This includes Political, Economic, Social and Technological factors. All these factors cannot be controlled by an organization and changes in these factors tend to have severe impact on the modus operand of the business of a company (Kotler, 2001, p. 25). Internal Environmental Factors Micro environmental factors are those that can be controlled by a company. These are all internal factors. The micro environmental factors include Organizational workplace environment, Suppliers, competitors and customers. The strengths and weaknesses of a company are the biggest refection of the internal environment of a company. SWOT analysis is the best possible tool to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Among these strengths and weaknesses are micro or internal factors. On the other hand opportunities and threats are macro environmental factors (Burgemeister, 2003, p. 192). Electronic Marketing and Data mining Various marketing audit reports have suggested that due to the rise of the digital medium and technology, marketing is going through a paradigm of shift. Today instead of going outdoors people prefer to stay in-house and look for information through internet. Also the number of digital sales has also increased. A part from this people are also spending a lot of time on the social media platform providing brands to an opportunity to engage the public through social media. Another affect of the rise of technology has been the data driven approach of marketing. Today marketers are looking to gather customer data for the application of marketing analytics to get a thorough understanding of the customer behaviour. Various packages like SAS, SPSS are being used for data mining and data analytics. Analytics is mainly used in customer behaviour analysis as well as predictive modelling. Since the main objective of marketing audit is the analysis the present situation of a company and recommend future plan of action; keeping this point in mind it is to be said that data mining and analytics is quite important for a successful marketing audit system. Corporate Social Responsibility Corporate social responsibility is the ongoing commitment made by business entities to behave ethically and make contribution to the economic development and growth while maintaining and if possible improving the quality of the workforce; families of the work force as well as the society and community. As per the reports of various marketing audit systems it has been found that customers around the globe have become a lot more health and environment conscious. Today people want to do business with companies that are lot more socially responsible. Hence social responsibility is no more an arm chain philanthropy; rather it has become a key part of the overall business strategy of the company (Zarrela, 2010, p. 45). Illustrative examples In order to provide a practical illustrative example of marketing audit of Parks department has been chosen. The main objective of the parks department is to ensure cultural, leisure and sporting opportunities for the people of Oxford. The main mission of parks department is to understand and determine customer aspirations, open spaces and the facilities within those parks and open spaces. Overall the company is dedicated to protect and enhance natural environment and also to encourage participation of the people of Oxford in healthy lifestyles. Marketing Audit of Parks department Macro Environment Analysis From a political perspective the city of Oxford is presently a minority in the liberal Democrat administration and future changes in the domain of political and administrative operations are likely to have implications on the Parks department. From an economic perspective UK is still looking to get over after affects of the economic downturns of 2008. Due to such economic downturn the disposable income of the people of UK has gone down. From a social perspective three are more than 100000 people living in Oxford. Due to the issue of global warming people have become a lot more environment friendly and looking to adopt a healthy life style. However, changes in economy would not hurt the park more as the services are mostly free or quite cheap. Technological advances would help the park a lot; especially from a marketing perspective. The park would be able to use web and social media marketing to promote the product as well as to engage customers (Churchill, 2009, p.211). Micro Environment analysis through SWOT Strengths Standard of service is high High skills level of the workers Motivated employees Commitment to training on the part of the management Focus on customer care and service Good relationship with local community and customers Oxford Open spaces assessment Weaknesses Limited mapping and monitoring of the usage of services A nature to focus on quantity rather than quality Sometimes the company focuses a lot more on logistics instead of aesthetics. Opportunities Increase in concerns about environment among politicians and people Increase in tourism in the city Rise of digital medium Involvement of local community Probability to gain open space assessment under 106 agreements. Threats Budget cuts by city councils Increase in competition Lack of investment in infrastructure Perception of some people that parks are becoming unsafe for the people Growth in home entertainment Marketing objectives and Targets Objectives Based on the above analysis the marketing auditors decided to set marketing objectives for the parks department by using the growth vector matrix. Market Penetration: To improve the customer retention rate through service consultation Market Extension: To increase customer awareness to improve the use of services Service development: To adapt to modernization to improve service quality Diversification: To achieve diversification through augmentation. Targets Increase in the level of customer satisfaction by 2% over the course of next year. Increase in public awareness by at least 15% over the course of next year. Increase community and customer involvement. Recommended Marketing strategy based on marketing mix Product/Service Over the course of next few years one of the main objectives of the company would be to improve the product quality through increasing involvement of local community. Also the parks department would look to introduce services based on the needs of the customers and would look to focus on pruning the less successful services from the product line Price The focus would be on increasing sponsorship and external funding by forming new partnership with local business communities. Overall the price of the services would be relatively cheap. Place The main focus would be to position the park as a place to have fun; to boost the use of the park as place to meet and socialize. Promotion Drastic changes in the promotional activities are suggested. As per the auditors mainly the park has relied on outdoor marketing and leaflets to promote the products along with press articles. But now it is suggested that the park focuses on a lot more internet based approach. The park has a website; however it would require lot modifications both content and design wise. Also the park would be focusing on the presence on social media especially on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and blogs. The main objective would be position the park as a fun and healthy place to be. The concept of green would be a part from the overall promotional activities. But apart from that customer engagement would be the key to the success of the parks and there is probably no better place to engage the customers rather than social media (Belch and Michael, 2005, p. 325). Control Mechanism A team consisting of Parks managers and independent market research firm would form the marketing audit team. The team would meet every week once to review the success and effectiveness of the plan to ensure marketing control (Wenderoth, 209, p. 359). Marketing audit is the process by which an organization can assess the present and past marketing activities; so that the company can improve the future marketing activities. However, marketing audit is not a simple process as a matter of fact it is a rather complex continuous process which involves the assessment of internal and external environment, customer feedback and market research, analysis and planning for the future course of actions to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the marketing operations to reach the desired objective. Today the rise of technology has boosted the marketing audit process especially in the domain of digital marketing and customer data analytics. In simple terms marketing audit helps a company to assess the gap between the actual and planned activities and take corrective actions to reduce the gap. References Belch, G and Michael, G.2005. Advertising &Promotion-An Integrated marketing Communications Perspective. McGraw-Hill: UK. Brown, L. 2009. Marketing and Distribution Research. Ronald Press Company: US. Burgemeister, S. 2003. Market analysis. GRIN Verlag: DE. Churchill, G. 2009. Marketing Research. Cengage Learning: UK. Czinzota, M., Ronkainen, I., Moffett, M., Marinova, S. & Marinov, M. 2009. International business (European edition). John Wiley: UK. Henry, A. 2008. Understanding Strategic Management. Oxford University Press: UK. Kolb, B. 2008. Marketing Research: A Practical Approach. Sage: UK. Kotler, P. 2001. Marketing Management. Prentice Hall: UK. Wenderoth, M. 2009. Particularities in the Marketing Mix for Service Operations, GRIN Verlag: DE. Zarrela, D. 2010. The Social Media Marketing Book. OReilly Media, Inc: CAN. Bibliography Cowan, A. 2005. Risk Analysis And Evaluation. Global Professional Publishing: UK. McDaniel, C., 1998. Marketing Research. New York: Taylor & Francis. Palepu, K., 2007. Business Analysis and Valuation. Stanford: Cengage Learning. Porter, M., 2008. Competitive Strategy. New York: Simon and Schuster. Rao, V. 2010. Handbook of Pricing Research in Marketing. Edward Elgar Publishing: India. Read More