Marketing fundamentals

Marketing Concepts

• Marketing is a circular system that focuses on satisfying consumers.
• Social marketing can shift destructive attitudes, encouraging actions like reducing littering, exercising, and healthier eating.
• Success in marketing hinges on understanding and catering to customer needs.
• STP involves segmenting, targeting, and positioning.
• The four P's of marketing which are pricing, places of distribution, promotional communications, along with product and service decisions
• Marketing mix involves very specific and interrelated decision areas.
• Marketing goals can include rapid growth, creating social value, having monetary products, competency, achieving excellence, fame, and even notoriety.
• Business success is often short-lived due to the ever-changing times and preferences.
• Caveat emptor translates from Latin to "let the buyer beware".
• Externalities refer to costs markets impose on uninvolved third parties.
• Markets allocate resources in society to meet consumer goals.
• Marketing helps allocate limited resources to meet societal needs effectively.
• Pareto optimal results mean societal resources are used efficiently among all parties.

Qualities of Wise Markets

• Require diversity of opinion to bring multiple perspectives to decision-making.
• Rely on decentralization so individuals can form their own opinions.
• Aggregate diverse opinions to improve market decisions through disagreement, contest, and seeking alternatives.

Production and Marketing Strategies

• Mass production means production is at a high, efficient level.
• Target marketing focuses on serving specific and discreet customer needs.
• Demarketing reduces or shifts demand.

Types of Organizational Markets

• Business markets consist of enterprises buying goods/services for production and service provision.
• Reseller markets are enterprises buying goods and services to resell for profit.
• Government markets are public agencies buying goods/services to produce services or transfer them to those in need, like the U.S. federal government and other regional and local municipalities.
• International markets involve buyers from other countries..
• Institutional markets include hospitals, schools, libraries, and non-profit organizations.
• Suppliers include organizations and individuals providing resources for production. Marketing intermediaries are independent organizations aiding product flow to markets.
• Channels of distribution are intermediates operating between the organization and its consumer markets.
• The supply chain encompasses the whole system of interlocking organizations.

Wants, Needs, and Value

• A want becomes explicitly recognized when someone identifies how to satisfy a particular need.
• Market exchange involves giving or receiving something of value.
• Value comprises the consumer's perceived physical and symbolic worth of a product.
• Perceived value includes both the product's quality and symbolic benefits compared to its cost.
• Exchanged value can include an idea, attainable good, service or a combination of these.
• Value is defined as received benefits divided by price (money, time, and other costs included).

Forms of Utility

• Form utility is the value added through a product's physical attributes, i.e. shape, size and design.
• Place utility increases value by making products conveniently available.
• Time utility is providing products at the ideal time.
• Possession utility transfers ownership value to the buyer.
• Customers are individuals or organizations making exchanges/purchases.
• Consumers are those who use or consume the product.
• Value often equals perceived quality divided by expectations.
• Logistics includes transporting and storing.
• Marketing transactions create relationships through exchanges of social value.

Customer Satisfaction

• Customer satisfaction includes repurchase intentions, word of mouth referrals, and low complaining behavior.
• Key financial indicators are revenues, market share, profitability, and growth .
• Three important components to successfully execute the marketing concept by orienting towards understanding distinctive customer needs, and coordinating every department to ensure customer satisfaction at all points of contact, with long-term profitability in mind
• The societal marketing concept balances customer needs with delivering superior value while improving both customer and societal well-being.

SWOT & Competitors

• A SWOT analysis is used to discover and focus on the business for internal and external analysis
• The types of marketing competition are direct competitors along with indirect, potential, and future competitors.
• Primary markets create securities, while secondary markets trade them.
• Qualitative marketing research explores reasons and opinions, while quantitative research gathers statistical data.
• Focus groups are when small groups gather to discuss questions is a moderated setting.
• Observational studies answer based purely on what researchers observe.

Components of Good Research

• Define clear objectives and develop testable hypotheses.
• Select appropriate research methods considering primary and secondary sources.
• Identify and engage with the target audience through effective sampling techniques.
• Conduct unbiased research and analyze with clear and actionable insights.
• The four factors of marketing segments are demographic, geographic, psychological, an behavioral variables.

Effective Market Segments

• Must be measurable, profitable, stable, reachable, internally homogeneous, externally heterogeneous, and responsive.
• Need to be cost-effective.
• To define marketing targets, begin by understanding your objectives, creating a strategic marketing plan, being realistic, setting specific goals, and meeting your deadlines.
• Consumer buying satisfies individual needs, but instead industrial procurement produces goods satisfying needs
• The 5 stages of the consumer buying model are to identify a problem, search for product information, evaluate alternatives, make a purchase decision, with post-purchase evaluation.
• Cognitive dissonance is a marketing tool that can influence behavior by creating conflicting beliefs.