Marketing Chapter 1: Customer-Driven Concepts

Chapter 1: Customer-Driven Marketing

• Five core marketplace concepts: Understanding customer needs, wants, and demands is crucial. Products, services, and experiences are central. Value, satisfaction, and exchanges are key concepts. Marketing involves managing customer relationships to achieve organizational goals. Marketing creates value for customers and captures value from them.
• Customer-driven marketing strategy: Identifies target markets; creates, differentiates, and positions products for target markets.
• Marketing definition: Marketing is a societal process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering, and exchanging products and services of value.
• Marketing management orientations: Different approaches to managing marketing activities, reflecting distinct viewpoints on satisfying customer needs. They include the production, product, selling, marketing, and societal marketing concepts.
• Customer relationship management (CRM): Building and maintaining profitable relationships with customers. Creates value for customers and captures value from them.
• Trends and forces changing the marketing landscape: Rapidly evolving tech, global competition, and shifting social values are shaping marketing.

Chapter 2: Strategic Marketing Planning

• Companywide strategic planning: Four-step process: defining a mission, setting goals and objectives, designing a business portfolio, and developing strategies.
• Business portfolio and growth strategies: Analyzing products and markets to create a profitable mix. Growth strategies include market penetration, market development, product development, and diversification.
• Marketing's role in strategic planning: Collaborates with other departments and partners to achieve strategic goals.
• Customer-driven marketing strategy and mix: Target market selection, product/service positioning, price, promotion, and place (distribution) are vital components.
• Marketing management functions and marketing plan elements: Identifying market opportunities, analyzing competitors, conducting market research, developing strategies and action plans, and monitoring.

Chapter 3: External Marketing Environment

• Macro-environmental forces: Large-scale factors (economic, technological, social, and cultural) impacting a company's ability to serve customers.
• Micro-environmental forces: Close-up factors (suppliers, competitors, intermediaries) affecting a company's ability to serve customers.
• Demographic and economic trends: Changes in age, income, and consumer spending behaviors influence marketing decisions.

Chapter 4: Marketing Information and Research

• Importance of Information: Company understanding of the marketplace is critical for effective marketing decisions.
• Marketing Information System (MIS): System for gathering, analyzing, and distributing relevant information to support marketing decisions.
• Marketing Research Process: Steps involved in gathering and analyzing data to understand customer needs and market conditions (defining the problem, developing research plan, collecting data, analyzing data, and presenting findings).
• Analyzing and distributing marketing information: How companies manage and use collected information to make marketing decisions.
• Special issues in marketing research: Public policy and ethical considerations related to data collection and analysis.