A Marketing Journal - Essay Example

We believe that digital marketing is an attractive proposition for more consumer product or service categories than is typically assumed. In fact most consumer marketers - be they in financial services, travel, music, and books, even food and beverages - should be exploring how to capture the digital world's business opportunities. For marketers of consumer goods or services, the emergence of a new consumer market space is no longer a matter of speculation or hype. In the consumer world, users of many popular branded products subscribe today to interactive media at rates two to three times the national average.

By 2000, there will be between 30 and 40 million of such "digital" consumers. [Stone, B. (1997)] Social marketing is a strategy that uses marketing approaches developed within the business arena to design, implement, and evaluate socially beneficial programs. This approach can be an effective social change strategy for groups working in the profession of community development. This paper describes two community-based projects that employed social marketing to design and implement interventions to promote health in Arkansas and Florida.

We describe the stages of the research, as well as the limitations and strengths of this approach. Within the world of domestic and international commerce, the principles and practices of business marketing have proven to be powerful in maximizing profit by creating or increasing consumer demand for goods and services and reducing the real or perceived costs of these goods and services. While product marketing is integral to the world of business, social marketing, the application of marketing approaches to non-business enterprises, such as community development efforts, is not so widespread. (1) Social marketing is now in a rapid growth phase, with several textbooks, a peer review journal, two conferences, and numerous social marketing institutions now available to assist program planners in using this powerful approach to social change (Andreasen, 2002).

Article 3:Relationship marketing is one of the newest schools of marketing thought. Unlike the customer-acquisition focus on traditional marketing, relationship marketing focuses on retaining existing customers (Berry 1995). It concentrates on the long-term, ongoing relational exchange so vital to service firms today (Dwyer, Schurr, and Oh 1987) and represents a genuine paradigm shift in marketing theory (Morgan and Hunt 1994). The recent work of the Electric Cooperatives Brand Identity Steering Committee of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) underscores the importance of relationship marketing as a tool for long-term competitive advantage.

The 42-member committee introduced Touchstone Energy to symbolize the various elements that "represent the relationship between COUs and their consumer-members and the communities they serve," said Glenn English, NRECA chief executive officer. "The brand identity embodied in Touchstone Energy is an important development in helping electric co-ops retain their current customer base and prepare for increasing competition in the industry" (Miller 1997).Article 4:Statistical research in marketing is heavily influenced by the availability of different types of data.

The last 10 years have seen an explosion in the amount and variety of data available to market researchers. Demand data from scanning equipment have now become