Marketing: Prospects, Customers, and Branding

• Prospects are potential customers who have the $, authority, and desire to purchase, aiming to understand their wants and needs to create need-satisfying products.
• Customers have already bought products.
• Advertising research helps managers develop advertising strategies, ads, and campaigns.
• Market research helps managers make marketing decisions.
• A product gives value/satisfaction to a consumer.
• A brand is a name, term, design, or combination that identifies a good/service and distinguishes it from competition.
• It represents everything a company's offering stands for.
• Personal branding is important for positioning and targeting and lays the foundation for success.
• Promotion is defined as communications by marketers to influence potential buyers' opinions or responses by informing, persuading, and reminding.

Communication Process

• The communication process establishes commonness of thought.
• Elements include sender > encoding - message channel > decoding > receivers > feedback.
• Controlled aspects: sender/source, encoding, message channel.
• Segmentation identifies and describes market segments.
• Targeting evaluates segments and determines which one to seek.
• Positioning designs a good/service to meet customer needs and develops a Marketing Mix that creates competitive advantage.
• Validity is the accuracy and reliability is the dependability of data.
• Primary research includes internal company data, government data, periodicals, and commercial sources.
• Secondary research includes direct observation, focus groups, surveys, and experiments.
• Advertising/promotions are prominent tools to reach/influence the market, increase demand, and change consumer behavior.
• Puffery involves exaggerations that may cause consumer dissatisfaction if results don't match claims.
• Misrepresentation is factually false and can be deadly if the claim is not matching.
• Cease & desist is a halt of violation of law/regulation by government/court issued.
• Corrective Ad is a severe penalty for fabricating false/misleading selling points & misrepresenting product to the public.
• Consent Decree is less formal, possibly self-imposed, and remediates potential issues.
• Acquiring prospects involves $ spent to gain customers.
• Retention of existing customers is more valuable to the company.
• Regaining of old customers.
• Marketers study consumer behavior to understand the relationship between the product they want to sell and the market, including who will buy, what, when, where, and how.
• Source credibility/source attractiveness involves a spokesperson and is multidimensional.
• Product utility is the benefit of the product.
• IMC (Integrated Marketing Communications) includes many promotional tools to build/maintain awareness, identity, and preference.
• Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV) is the amount of $ a customer spends on your company over time.
• LTV calculation: Gross margin (spending) X Churn rate (times they buy from you) X monthly spending.
• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) calculation: (sales + Marketing budget) / # customers in one period.

AIDA Model

• Grabs Attention
• Informs
• Creates Desire
• Call to Action

Promotional Tools

• Advertising is a paid form of non-personal communication of goods/services by an identified person.
• PR involves organized activity fostering goodwill between a company & various publics.
• Direct Marketing includes physical materials to communicate about a product.
• Sales Promotion consists of promotional activities for short-term buying behavior.
• Personal Selling involves paid person-to-person communication where a seller determines needs & wants & attempts to persuade.
• Online promotion occurs on the internet.
• Social Media Marketing involves electronic communications through User-Generated Content (UGC) shared on social networks.
• Persuasion is a change of beliefs/attitudes.
• Learning is a permanent change in behavior because of experience.
• Central route to persuasion: product has a distinct advantage.
• Peripheral route to persuasion: used when otherwise customers wouldn't pay attention.
• Segmentation variables include demographic (age, race) and geographic (location).

Targeting Strategies

• Undifferentiated/mass marketing
• Concentrated/niche/single segment
• Multi-segment/selective