knowledge «

Archive for the ‘knowledge’ Category

The marketing mix

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

What’s it all about?
The marketing mix, often referred to as the 4P’s is probably the most well known concept in marketing. It’s the set of marketing tools that a company uses to pursue its marketing objectives in a chosen target market. We call the elements of the marketing mix, tactical components of marketing, as they occur in your day-to-day short term plans.

The marketing mix consists of; Product, Price, Place and Promotion and all 4 elements, when balanced, offer an effective marketing tool for a variety of processes. The extended Marketing Mix or the 7P’s as they’re more commonly known expands the number of variables from the original 4P’s model to 7. This adds Physical Evidence, Processes and People and is used in service industries and knowledge intensive environments such as consultancy and programming.

The marketing mix consists of:

Product - For many, a product is simply the tangible, physical entity that they maybe buying or selling. You buy a new car and that’s the product.

Price – Of all the elements of the marketing mix, price is the one which creates the revenue, all others are costs. In theory, price can really only be determined by the discovery of what customers perceive is the value of the item on sale.

Place – What we mean by place is not the geographical location, it’s the methods of distribution used to get products and services to customers. Place is also defined as channel, distribution, or an intermediary. It’s the way in which goods and services are moved from the manufacturer or service provider to the user or consumer.

Promotion - This is normally what people ‘wrongly’ perceive marketing to be all about. The promotional mix consists of various tools available to the marketer such as; advertising, sales promotions, direct marketing, e-marketing, public relations; social media, exhibitions, sponsorship, point of sale, PR, etc.

Physical evidence – This is the element of the service mix which allows the consumer to make judgments on the organisation based on appearance and on the service that’s received.

Processes – Procedures, mechanisms and flow of activities by which services are consumed, and how they are received by the end user, are all essential elements of process strategies.

People – All people directly or indirectly involved in the consumption of a service are an important part of the extended marketing mix. Knowledge workers, employees, management and other consumers often add significant value to the total product or service offering.

When to use your marketing mix?

It’s not just a matter of having a brilliant product and hoping it will sell itself – and being the cheapest may not be enough either. Even with a world-beating product at just the right price, if people don’t know about it and can’t get hold of it you’ll never be able to make it a success.

The use of the marketing mix will apply at various different stages of your business, but the whole mix, whether this is the core or extended mix, should be fundamental to the marketing plan.

What does it achieve?

• Helps you to focus on a more limited (and achievable) set of objectives. It then becomes much clearer which elements of the marketing mix need to be used, and hence you achieve more profitable results from your marketing budget.
• Lower risk through improved forecast accuracy.
• Improve competitive advantage through greater flexibility.
• Easily calculate the effects of specific marketing tactics across business units, channels, geographies and product lines.
• Lower marketing expenses by more frequently predicting the performance of marketing campaigns at different levels.

Key steps:

• Define your customers and markets
• Look at your business and decide which of the market mix matters most to you
• Ensure that the main components complement and support one another – this is the only proven route to long-term business success.

Try asking “why” and “what if” questions to challenge your offer. For example, ask why your target audience needs a particular feature. What if you drop your price by 5%? What if you offer more colours? Why sell through wholesalers rather than direct channels? What if you improve PR rather than rely on TV advertising?

As a product moves through each life cycle then the marketing mix will change. An appropriate and individual marketing mix should be developed for each product and should always keep the target market and target segment in mind.

Tags: 4p, 7p, elements of the marketing mix, marketing mix
Posted in Marketing, knowledge | 1 Comment »

One of the biggest reasons why companies still choose to use Trade shows in their marketing mix is for lead generation. If planned properly then attending these trade shows as part of your marketing mix can prove quite fruitful.

We recently stumbled across a nice top 100 tick list of things to do to ensure a smooth and successful trade show; here are the ones that stood out for us;

1. Exhibit at fewer shows, putting more effort into booth staff preparation and promotions tailored specifically for each show.
2. Attend more shows as a visitor to get some insight into what works and what doesn’t.
3. Track leads and follow up immediately. This sounds like marketing advice 101 but it’s surprising to find out how much effort people go into putting on the show and next to nothing in the follow up process.
4. Pick your booth space carefully. If possible, tag onto regional groups and pick the stand with the most traffic.
5. Send out invites to your prospects to visit your booth and set up meetings in advance. Send complimentary tickets if you have them.
6. Send email invites to the show’s pre-registered attendee list for this year and the registered attendee list from last year.
7. If you’re using social media than leverage this to reach more attendees.
8. Post your trade show schedule on your website with a link to sign up for appointments.
9. Make a theme for the show and give away something that is relevant and useful, build a story around this and use in your press packs.
10. Have a contest for attendees in your booth

Obviously there’s a lot more to running a successful show than just the above, but we believe if you keep a tight control on the small things, everything else will fall into place.

Use these events as the conversation starter and keep the conversations going!

Tags: lead generation, promotional mix, trade show
Posted in knowledge | No Comments »

The Marketing Audit

Monday, May 17th, 2010

What is a Marketing Audit?

The marketing audit is basically a structured analysis and review of your current marketing activities carried out through an examination of your marketing strategies, tactics and objectives. The audit is also undertaken to highlight problem areas and identify opportunities with a view to recommending a plan of action to improve the overall marketing performance for your company.

When to use Marketing Audits?

The Audit consists of two key areas; the external audit and the internal audit and should normally be undertaken, at the very least, on an annual basis as part of your overall business planning and objectives. The marketing audit also proves to be an extremely useful tool when contemplating market entry as it allows your management team to assess the attractiveness of the market in which it seeks to enter.

External Audit
The external audit takes into consideration the overall MACRO environment such as political, economic, social/cultural, technological, environmental and legal factors that may or may not affect your business activities. It also encompasses your competitive environment known as the MESO environment, i.e. what and who are you competing against and how could this threaten your current market share and position.

By considering a variety of factors such as; substitutes that could replace your product or service, changes in consumer lifestyles and values; market size, growth and profits; major market segments, their expected growth rates and which segments provide you with the greatest opportunity to meet your objectives, the external audit and analysis allows you to:

• Identify future events
• Identify threats and opportunities
• Identify strategic uncertainties in the market
• Identify any drifting or deviations from your original ‘plan’, that may occur

Internal Marketing Audit
This is your opportunity to put your own business under the microscope – do you know as much about your own situation as you should? This internal audit takes a close examination of your current business situation, how profitable is your company and how this may affect your marketing effectiveness and marketing mix. Also, what are your marketing objectives? Are these clearly identified and stated and if so, are they consistent with your overall company objectives and appropriate for the company’s competitive position, resources, and opportunities?

The internal marketing audit therefore focuses on the following areas:
• Strategy – is it realistic?
• Organisational structure – how does it operate and does it work?
• Systems – focus on the efficiency of the planning system
• Productivity – are the products profitable and is the organisation operationally efficient?
• Functions – examines the details of the marketing tools

So what does a Marketing Audit and analysis achieve?

The thorough audit and analysis of your marketing activities gives you the opportunity to objectively review what you’re currently doing and are you doing it right? Based on this review you can then identify the next steps forward in implementing and maintaining a solid marketing strategy.

Tags: internal audit, macro environment, marketing audit, marketing strategies
Posted in knowledge | 1 Comment »

Role of marketing

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

Marketing has taken a variety of forms as it’s developed over the years. A common and extremely incorrect view is that selling and advertising is marketing. Although these activities are part of the marketing mix and were generally perceived as the only outputs from a lot of marketing efforts that were measured, they are indeed only a fraction of this whole process.

In addition to promotional activities, or the extended marketing mix as they’re more commonly known, marketing includes a much broader strategic and tactical set of functions including; auditing & analysis, planning, product development, packaging, pricing, distribution, customer service and evaluation.

Many organisations and businesses assign responsibility for the marketing functions to a marketing manager or specific group of creative’s within the organisation. In this respect, marketing is a unique and separate entity. Those who make up the marketing department may also include brand and product managers, marketing researchers, sales representatives, advertising and promotion managers, pricing specialists, and customer service personnel.

A Marketer will typically take up the following roles, acting between the customer and the organisation; Strategic Partner, Guide, Deliverer, Communicator, Co-ordinator, Negotiator and Customer Voice.

A Marketing role will also assume the following responsibilities;

• Understanding the economic and competitive features of a sector
• Identifying target markets
• Identifying segments within a target market
• Identifying most appropriate strategies
• Commissioning, understanding and acting upon market research
• Understanding competitors and their strategies and likely responses
• Developing new products
• Auditing customers’ brand experience
• Establishing environmental scanning for opportunities and threats
• Understanding an organisation’s strengths and weaknesses
• Creating a sustainable competitive advantage
• Understanding where a brand needs to be in the future
• Creating and delivering marketing plans to get there
• Establishing management information systems to identify progress

What does marketing achieve?
As a managerial process, marketing is the way in which an organisation determines its best opportunities in the market place, given its objectives and resources. Therefore the managerial philosophy of marketing puts central emphasis on customer satisfaction as the means for gaining and keeping loyal customers. Therefore, Marketers urge their organisations to carefully and continually gauge target customers’ expectations and to consistently meet or exceed these expectations.

In order to accomplish this, everyone in all areas of the organisation must focus on understanding and serving customers; the business will find it hard to succeed if marketing occurs only in the marketing department and does not involve everyone.

Tags: advertising and promotion, brand experience, developing new products, marketing mix, promotional activities, strategic partner, sustainable competitive advantage, target markets
Posted in knowledge | 2 Comments »

Definition of marketing

Monday, April 26th, 2010

What is it? The Chartered Institute of Marketing definition: “The management process which identifies, anticipates and supplies customer requirements efficiently and profitably” – Chartered Institute of Marketing (2008).

What this is saying is that Marketing is a management process that should be considered at board level and the marketing strategy should be integral to the firm’s business plan. A company will also use market research and environmental scanning to identify and anticipate customer needs, and then build a marketing plan, in the form of a marketing mix.

The marketing plan and marketing mix offered by the company must then go on to exceed the customers expectations at all times, but it must do so efficiently and profitably. It does this by selecting certain products/services and segments that will allow this to happen. So, 'marketing' happens when a company’s focus is on the customer, everything is geared towards what the customer wants. It takes into account things that the competition is doing. It looks at the cooperation between the different functions within an organisation, and responds to changes both in the environment and the customers needs, rather than trying to push the company’s own objectives into the market all of the time.

Focus is also on profit rather than on number of sales or turnover.

Role of a Marketer: Marketers effectively manage the marketing mix whilst acting as across function champions within a company. They project manage, co-ordinate, advise and inspire creativity whilst always looking after the overall company brand image.

Marketers also act as the following;

• Guide
• Deliverer
• Communicator
• Co-ordinator
• Negotiator
• Customer Voice
• Strategic partner

When to engage Marketing? Marketing should be used now and every day. It should be embedded within your company. It’s a management process, and as described clearly in the CIM definition, is integral to the business plan. Even seasonal businesses must continually reach out to customers or risk having to rebuild their sales every year.

Marketing should be used for;

• Establishing environmental scanning for opportunities and threats
• Understanding an organisation’s strengths and weaknesses
• Creating a sustainable competitive advantage
• Understanding where a brand needs to be in the future
• Creating and delivering marketing plans to get there
• Establishing management information systems to identify progress

What does it achieve? Marketing activities ultimately result in a marketing oriented company.

The characteristics of which are;

• You are driven by customers needs
• Your customers can be grouped together according to their different needs so that products can be tailored to suit
• Customers always have access to information and advice they need on how to use a product or it’s availability
• Employees are involved with the final quality of products and services and don’t just rely on their production departments
• Enables delivery of customer value

A common regret of most failed companies is that they didn’t initialise any marketing programs prior to failure. Bringing in new customers without prospect databases, not having marketing tools or materials and often little or no name recognition in the marketplace is tough. However the role of a marketer in managing the marketing mix, acting as across function champion, project managing, co-ordinating, advising and inspiring to ensure corporate identity is protected, means that you do not have to go it alone.

Key steps:

• Conduct a Marketing audit and analysis of your current state
• Identify your objectives – link in with business plan
• Identify your strategy – long term plans
• Create you short term tactical marketing communications; marketing mix
• Evaluate the process • Re-audit and adjust tactical plans as necessary

Top Tips: Invest in professional marketing advice or support. This can mean as little as bouncing ideas off a marketer, outsourcing the role or employing someone full time, it depends on individual circumstances. And secondly, develop a plan, use it but remember the fluidity of its nature; evaluation and control should be a critical part in your ongoing development. Always remember that the definition of marketing is about satisfying customer’s needs profitable, and to do so it needs an appropriate marketing orientation.

Tags: marketing definition, marketing mix, marketing plan, marketing strategy
Posted in Strategic Marketing, knowledge | 3 Comments »