Introduction to Marketing Principles

Defining Marketing & the Marketing Process

• Marketing's purpose is to create and maintain profitable customer relationships, with the core functions being marketing and innovation.
• Marketing helps attract and retain customers profitably.
• Innovation and marketing have key roles in business success.
• Attracting new customers is more expensive than retaining existing ones.
• Companies need to understand and monitor competitors.
• Marketing creates mutually profitable and long-term relationships.

The Scope of Marketing

• Marketing encompasses various entities including places, properties, organizations, information, ideas, goods, services, experiences, events, and people.
• Marketing skills involve influencing demand levels, timing, and composition for these entities.

What is Marketing?

• Marketing has origins in human needs and wants, with the aim of competitively and profitably satisfying those needs.
• Marketing management plans and executes the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of products and services to create exchanges that meet individual and organizational goals.

Understanding the Marketplace & Customer Needs

• Needs represent basic human requirements.
• Wants are specific objects that might satisfy needs.
• Demands represent wants for specific products backed by the ability to pay.
• Market offerings include a variety of products, services, and experiences intended to satisfy needs or wants.
• Marketing myopia is defined as paying more attention to specific products than to the benefits and experiences yielded by those products.
• Customer value, satisfaction and profitability are important concepts.

Designing a Customer Value-Driven Strategy

• Market segmentation is the division of the market into segments of customers.
• Target marketing involves selecting specific customer segments to serve.
• Value propositions specify how the company will serve customers and differentiate itself in the market.

The Marketing Concept

• Corporate goals are achieved through meeting and exceeding customer needs better than competitors.
• Customer orientation is essential for providing satisfaction.
• Integrated effort means all staff accepting responsibility for creating customer satisfaction.
• Corporate goals are met by achieving customer satisfaction.

The Development of Marketing

• Market-driven businesses center on customers, understanding their criteria, and responding to market changes.
• Internally-oriented businesses focus on their convenience and assume price and product are key to sales success.
• Key steps in the development of marketing include identifying customer choice criteria, matching strategies, understanding competitor's actions and using marketing research to monitor and react to market changes.
• Innovation is essential for companies.

Preparing an Integrated Marketing Plan: The 4 Ps

• Product, Pricing, Place, and Promotion are key elements of an integrated marketing plan.
• The product aspect includes product variety, design, features, brand name, packaging, and services.
• Pricing involves list price, discounts, allowances, and payment arrangements.
• Place encompasses distribution channels, locations, and transportation options.
• Promotion includes advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, publicity, and public relations

Managing Customer Relationships & Capturing Customer Value

• Managing customer relationships aims to build and maintain profitable relationships by delivering superior customer value and satisfaction.
• Customer perceived value is the customer's evaluation of the difference between all benefits and all costs of an offer versus competing offers.
• Customer satisfaction is the extent to which a product's performance meets the buyer's expectations.

Customer Engagement and Today's Digital and Social Media

• Customer-engagement marketing fosters direct, continuous involvement from customers to shape conversations, experiences, and community around the brand.
• Consumer-generated marketing reflects the increasing role consumers play in shaping brand experiences.

Capturing Value From Customers

• Customer loyalty and retention is crucial and is driven by customer satisfaction.
• A growing share of customer purchasing is a key factor for any company.
• Building customer equity is essential considering the combined value of current and potential customers.

The Digital Age

• Digital and social media marketing tools are essential for reaching customers.
• Mobile marketing is a crucial aspect for engaging customers conveniently.
• A strong digital strategy leverages tools like websites, social media, mobile apps, online video, email and blogs for targeting consumers.

Designing Digital Marketing Strategy (The POEM Framework)

• The POEM framework provides a strategic framework.
• The framework encompasses Paid media (PPC, Display Ads, TV/Magazine/Transit Ads), Owned media (website, blogs, events, stores, employees), and Earned media (shared content, reviews, and press coverage) strategies.
• Understanding the importance of employing these strategies is crucial.

Market Segmentation, Targeting & Positioning

• Segmenting a total market into smaller segments is key for successful marketing.
• Targeting involves selecting the segment to enter.
• Identifying suitable segments and creating value propositions is crucial.
• Target selection helps in creating a differentiated value proposition to target segments effectively.

Segmenting Consumer Markets

• Understanding markets requires segmenting consumers based on characteristics like behaviour, psychographics, demographics, and geographic factors.

Benefit Sought Segmentation

• Understanding customer motivations for purchasing products based on their needs/benefits.
• Identifying demographic, behavioural, and psychographic characteristics in different segments.
• Differentiating products to appeal to various segments.

Criteria for Successful Segmentation

• Segments must be effective, measurable, accessible, and actionable to exploit the identified opportunities efficiently.
• Profitability of the targeted segments is crucial for business analysis.

Target Marketing Strategies

• Undifferentiated marketing targets the entire market with one marketing mix.
• Differentiated marketing targets different segments with different marketing mixes.
• Focused marketing targets a single segment with a specific marketing mix.
• Customized marketing targets individual customers with tailored marketing mixes.

Positioning

• Identifying the target market, product category, competitive products, point of difference and desired benefits.
• Building a strong brand and communicating value propositions are important.
• Creating a strong brand is necessary and can be successful through various initiatives.

Positioning Statement

• A positioning statement explicitly defines the target audience, product category, and point of difference of a product or brand.
• Understanding how to define and develop a brand positioning strategy is key.
• Identifying the competitive advantages that a product or brand may have is crucial.

Defining the Dimensions of Positioning

• Understanding who the target customer is is crucial.
• Defining the target market is essential for developing a successful marketing campaign.
• Understanding competitive products, benefits, emotional and functional elements, and usage situations is key for product positioning.

Possible Value Propositions

• Identifying potential value propositions that align with the chosen position is key to effective marketing.
• Focusing on factors such as newness, performance, customization, and design is crucial.

Product Differentiation

• Product differentiation encompasses form, features, performance, durability, reliability, reparability, and style/design.
• Understanding product differentiation is a key strategy for marketing teams.

Services Differentiation

• Services differentiation involves factors such as order ease, delivery time, customer training, customer consulting, maintenance, and repair.

Personnel Differentiation

• Service differentiation includes qualities like competence, courtesy, reliability, responsiveness, and communication.

Image Differentiation

• Brand image, the public's perception of the company or products, is a key element of differentiation.
• Branding, identity and values are crucial for marketing excellence.

Developing a Positioning Strategy

• Crucial for brands to achieve clarity, credibility, consistency, and competitiveness for building brand value.
• Marketing slogans should be memorable and convey a brand's key benefits.
• Effective communication of the positioning strategy is paramount.
• Various methods for communication of the positioning include attribute/benefit, price/quality, and use/application.

Perceptual Maps and Repositioning

• Used to identify competitor brands, assess key attributes, and understand consumer perceptions of brands in a two-dimensional map, which aids in repositioning a targeted product/brand dynamically.

Product and Brand Management

• Product refers to any entity, tangible or intangible, that can meet a customer need or want.
• Branding differentiates a product from competitors, which affects customer perception and purchase decisions.
• Building a brand involves several factors, including company value, consumer preferences, and loyalty.
• Strong brands often have high profits. The primary objectives are to develop and position a brand effectively in the marketplace.

Developing Brands

• Brand development, including augmentation of core products to increase their value, is key to success.
• Superior brand values distinguish brands from competitors.

Managing Brands & Product Lines

• Product line refers to groups of closely related products that offer related benefits.
• A product mix is the full set of products offered for purchase by a company.
• The width of offerings refers to the number of different product lines.
• Product life cycle stage (Introduction, Growth, Maturity, Decline) affects marketing strategies.

New Product Development

• Idea generation encompasses internal and external sources to create new products.
• Screening new product ideas helps determine commercial viability.
• Concept testing uses various methods to gauge consumer interest.
• Business analysis evaluates potential sales, costs, and profits.

Marketing Testing

• Marketing tests help assess consumer responses to new products using simulated markets, test markets, and international launches.
• Effective testing helps avoid major risks associated with launching new products.

The Diffusion of Innovation Process

• The diffusion process describes how new ideas/products spread to consumers over time.
• Roger's Innovation Adoption Curve categorizes adopters (innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards) and suggests targeting innovators and early adopters early in the process for successful product launches.

Integrated Marketing Communications

• The Promotional Mix includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, sponsorship, and direct marketing.
• Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) strategies coordinate all promotional tools for effective customer communication and brand building.

Brand Identity & Image

• Brand image is the set of representations associated with a brand in the mind of a consumer.
• Brand positioning strategically places the brand in the market relative to competitors.
• Strategies for brand extension and stretching can increase the scope of a brand.

This quiz explores the fundamental concepts of marketing, focusing on its purpose, processes, and scope. It highlights the importance of customer relationships, the role of innovation, and various entities involved in marketing. Understand how effective marketing strategies contribute to business success.