2024/2025 BMI3C Exam Review - Marketing Basics

2024/2025 BMI3C Exam Review - Mr. Rassi

Final Exam Topics: This review covers the main topics for the final exam. Topics not listed will not be assessed. Specific examples of not included topics include "competitive advantages for a service business"
Unit 1: Basics of Marketing
- Industrial Revolution's Impact: Steam, electricity, gas, and oil modernized factories, railroads, homes, and automobiles, leading to mass production and increased transportation.
- New Inventions & Marketing: Advertising informed consumers about new inventions, highlighting their benefits to boost sales as marketing became vital. Mass production often outpaced demand, necessitating marketing for visibility.
- Brand Components: Brands incorporate corporate or product names, logos, slogans designed to enhance memorability, and appealing to auditory memory.
- Marketing Components: Includes cost, pricing, athletes, celebrities, retail/e-retail, branding, and the distinction between raw materials, processed goods, and finished goods (consumer and industrial).
Unit 2: Advertising
- Advertising Goals: Raising brand awareness, encouraging product trial, fostering brand preference, reminding consumers of the brand, and repositioning brands.
- Steps to Developing a Message: Understanding the intent, the message, research, appeal (biological, emotional, and rational).
- Types of Advertising: One method is the "Bandwagon" method, involving promoting the feeling that everyone is already doing it, inviting those who aren't to join.
Unit 3: Publicity and Sales Promotions
- Publicity: Media coverage about a business that the business does not pay for, commonly perceived as more reliable than advertising, be it favorable or not.
- PR Firms: Hired to handle media relations (press releases, press conferences, public events), lobbying, crisis management, and social media promotions.
- Sales Promotions: Nonpersonal activities focused on boosting sales over a specified period, such as building traffic, creating interest in a service/product, and motivating staff.
Unit 4: Competition
- Free Market: A market where buyers and sellers determine prices for goods and services. This is contrasted with various forms of regulated markets like monopolies, oligopolies, monopolistic competition, and perfectly competitive markets.
- Competition Types: Companies compete in a relatively free market (relatively free entry) or in highly regulated markets with varying degrees of competition. Differing products, prices, and marketing strategies can distinguish various market structures.
Unit 5: Product Development
- SWOT Analysis: A four-part strategy that analyzes Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats both internally and externally.
- Product Life Cycle: Includes the stages of Development (research), Introduction (high costs, low sales), Growth (increasing sales), Maturity(sales peak, steady profits), and Decline (falling sales, fading market). Defining these steps can help with management.
Unit 6: Pricing
- Profit Calculation: Understanding profit as revenue minus expenses, markup as the difference between selling price and cost, and costing calculation based on units and fixed and variable costs. The calculation of profit margin also needs to be considered. Pricing strategies, like market skimming (high pricing), penetration pricing (low pricing), and competitive pricing, can be used.
Unit 7: Logistics
- Logistics: The process of designing and managing a supply chain. Involves handling purchasing, manufacturing, storage, and distribution. Factors to consider in transport are destination, weight, distance, and type of goods.
- Inventory Control: Determining what and how much is being controlled in terms of supply chain, storage, and turnover are important factors to manage in terms of costs and time.
Additional Topics
- Understanding Regulations: Advertising needs to be ethical, particularly when aimed at people vulnerable to influence. Consideration of regulations is vital.
- Break-Even Point & Contribution Margin: Calculating the cost at which you will break even(i.e. revenue/expenses are equal, neither losing or gaining) or the profit contribution factors to determine the needed production amount to attain break even point.
- Economies of Scale vs Diseconomies of Scale: Economies of scale involve decreased production costs as items increase, but diseconomies of scale describe complications arising from business growth and handling increased volumes.
- Price Lining and Everyday Low Pricing: These are used in product pricing strategies to set prices at which particular items are purchased/sold, and used to offer constant lowest prices.
E-Commerce and Social Media: E-Commerce is enhanced by customer convenience. Social Media Audits are used to review engagement on major platforms. Key components include defining your goal, platforms usage, brand image consistency, analytical measurements, and market awareness, with a SWOT analysis providing useful context for your strategy.