Marketing Class Notes

MODULE 1: MARKETING VALUE

At its most basic level, marketing is about making decisions that facilitate the process of buying and selling. In this module, you will begin to learn about the types of decisions that marketing managers make and the process by which they make them.

The prime directive of marketing is achieving individual and organizational objectives by creating superior customer value for one or more target markets with a sustainable strategy. These objectives are achieved through the key marketing concepts of:

• meeting target market’s needs and wants

• creating value

• segmenting target markets

• positioning.

Creating a sustainable strategy ensures marketers continue to create value for targeted customers until the objectives are met. This allows marketers to compete effectively against other organizations by emphasizing strategic thinking about marketing mix decisions, segmentation, and positioning. Keep in mind that marketing concepts can be applied to anything of value that can be exchanged—including products, services, people (personalities), ideas, and places. After you have completed the work in this module, you should be able to:

• Explain the function, philosophy, and concept of marketing.

• Express marketing’ s role in creating value.

• Describe how organizations practice ethical and socially responsible marketing.

• Analyze how political, legal, and cultural issues influence marketing strategies.

• Explain how SWOT Analysis is applied to marketing decision environments.

• Justify the rationale for your target market segmentation approach for a market.

• Develop rich profiles of target market segments using your own experience.

• Formulate appropriate positioning strategies for your targeted market segments.

• Illustrate how the strategic planning process can create a competitive advantage.

• Discuss how branding strategies create product identity.

Topic 1.1: What is Marketing?

The purpose of this topic is to introduce you to what marketing is, what marketers do, and why they do it. Most of us know a bit about marketing from being consumers—receivers of marketing. In this topic, you will begin to see what marketers think about and do before you as a consumer make your purchase decisions.

According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

The essence of marketing is about planning and executing the product, price, place and promotion, creating exchanges between buyers and sellers, and meeting the needs and wants of individuals and organizations. It is an organization-wide function (for-profit or not-for-profit) that creates value for customers, builds long-term and sustainable competitive advantage, and achieves the organization’s objectives, both financial and marketing.

What Can We Market

We can market many different things, including consumer and business products and services, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, as well as people, places, and ideas.

In marketing, a product can refer to a product (tangible item), a service (intangible item), an idea, a person or a place.

What is a Marketing Mix?

The marketing mix refers to the “product, price, place and promotion” aspects of marketing, often referred to as the ‘4 Ps’ of marketing. These are four controllable elements that create value for consumers and coordinate to influence the consumer’s purchase decision:

Product: What will you offer for sale?

Price: How much will you charge for the product?

Place: Where will you sell the product?

Promotion: How will you communicate the product offering?

To expand upon the 4 Ps a little more, a product is made up of features, attributes, and benefits (FABs), a price is a seller’s assignment of value to a product, place is the availability of the product to consumers through channels of distribution at the desired time and location, promotion is the communication efforts by a marketer to influence consumers or organizations about their product.

What is a Customer vs. a Consumer?

While a thin line separates the customer from the consumer, distinct differences exist. Understanding these distinctions is critical for organizations as it affects to whom and how they market their products.

A customer can be an organization or a single person that purchases and pays for a product from another organization or a single person but is not the end user of it.

A consumer is the end user (consumer) of the product, although he or she may or may not have purchased and paid for the product.

What is a Market vs. Marketplace?

Understanding the difference between a market and a marketplace can change the marketer’s objective when developing marketing plans, launching a brand, and leading a marketing team in the right direction.

A market consists of all the customers and/or potential customers who share a common need that can be fulfilled by an organization’s product and who have the financial resources, willingness, and qualifications to make the purchase.

A marketplace is a location where buying and selling occurs. This can be in a face to face (f2f) environment or in a broadcast (radio or television) or online (internet) environment.

Topic 1.2: Marketing Value Decisions

In this topic, you will begin to learn about the marketing value decisions that must be made, how these decisions are made, and in what ways marketing decisions are interconnected.

With the proliferation of the internet, social marketing, and other emerging forms of communication, all marketing decisions are made in a global environment. Segmentation