Marketing Mix & Philosophies

• The marketing mix consists of product, place, promotion, and price.
• Products can be tangible (physical goods) or intangible (services, ideas).
• Place refers to channels of distribution, such as brick-and-mortar stores or online platforms.
• Promotion involves informing, educating, persuading, and reminding consumers through promotional tools and media.
• Price is the cost to obtain the offering, including monetary and non-monetary costs.

Overview of Marketing Philosophies

• There are five marketing philosophies: product orientation, production orientation, sales orientation, market orientation, and societal marketing orientation.
• Product orientation focuses on creating superior product quality.
• Challenges include a lack of understanding of the customer.
• Production orientation focuses on making products readily available and affordable.
• Efficiency, cost-cutting, and mass production are priorities.
• Challenges include ignoring marketplace needs.
• Sales orientation focuses on selling as many units as possible.
• Belief is that aggressive sales techniques lead to higher sales and profits.
• Market orientation focuses on meeting customer needs and wants.
• Customer relationships, value delivery, and business objectives are priorities. Challenges include increased costs, data overload, and fast-changing trends.
• Societal marketing orientation balances customer satisfaction, organizational objectives, and society's long-term best interests.
• Priorities include customer needs, social responsibility, ethical business practices, and sustainability.

Strategic Planning

• Strategic planning includes creating SMART objectives: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
• A mission statement defines the business.
• A vision describes the desired future state resulting from the mission.
• SWOT analysis identifies strengths, weaknesses (internal), opportunities, and threats (external).
• Ansoff's Matrix considers products (existing vs. new) and markets (existing vs. new) for growth strategies.
• Market penetration is the lowest risk strategy to increase purchase frequency.
• Market development involves attracting new customers to existing products.
• Product development focuses on creating new products for existing customers.
• Diversification is the highest risk strategy to introduce new products into new markets.
• BCG Matrix analyzes market growth and market share to categorize products as question marks, stars, cash cows, or dogs.
• Each category represents a different stage in the product life cycle and suggests different strategies.
• PEST analysis involves watching for trends and disruptions in the political, economic, social, and technological environments.
• Macroenvironment includes broad factors beyond the company's control.
• Includes demographic, economic, political/legal, social/cultural, technological, environmental forces
• Microenvironment includes factors closer to the company with a direct impact on operations, such as customers, suppliers, and competitors.
• Some factors are controllable (internal), while others are uncontrollable (macro).

Marketing Research

• Exploratory research aims to gain insights and identify potential problems.
• Descriptive research describes characteristics of a population or market trends.
• Causal research establishes cause-and-effect relationships.
• Primary data is collected firsthand for a specific purpose.
• Secondary data is pre-existing data collected for another purpose.
• Quantitative research uses structured data collection for numerical results.
• Qualitative research uses unstructured methods for deeper insights.
• Probability sampling ensures every population member has a known chance of being selected.
• Non-probability sampling relies on researcher judgment.
• Probability sampling generally provides a better representation of the population, reducing bias.

Ethics and Social Responsibility

• Ethics are moral principles that guide behavior.
• Laws are enforceable rules established by governing bodies.
• Ethical norms, laws/policies form an active social society
• Ethical considerations in marketing include transparency in labels and packaging.
• Issues arise with competitive pricing, regulations for marketing to protected classes.
• Includes exclusive dealing, territory restraints, and market discrimination.
• Social marketing aims to influence behavior for social good.
• Consumer decisions are based on hedonic (emotional) and utilitarian (functional) value expectations.
• The consumer decision-making process involves need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase, and post-purchase behavior.
• Psychological, individual, cultural, and social factors influence consumer decision-making.

Segmenting and Targeting

• Segmenting divides potential customers into groups based on different characteristics.
• Good segments are stable, obtainable, large enough, identifiable, and distinctive
• Bases for segmentation include benefits, usage, geography, psychographics, and demographics.
• Targeting concentrates on a specific segment.
• Undifferentiated targeting uses a single strategy for the entire market.
• Differentiated targeting uses multiple strategies for different segments.
• Concentrated (niche) targeting focuses on a narrowly defined segment.
• One-to-one marketing tailors strategies to individual consumers.
• Positioning arranges for a product to occupy a clear, distinctive and desirable place relative to competitors.
• This arrangement involves core strategies like target segments, mental real estate, and meaningful benefits.
• Includes satisfiers and table stakes.
• Positioning bases are benefit, price/quality, use/application, user, class, competitor, and emotion.
• A multi-attribute model and positioning map are used to understand consumer attitudes and identify market opportunities.
• A visual representation helps identify market opportunities and illustrates where brands stand relative to one another.