Obama's Marketing Strategy

• Marketing is vital for success, constantly evolving, and adapting to changes like technological advancements and new marketing practices.

Obama's Marketing Strategy

• The "Obama for America" campaign used a charismatic politician, a message of hope, and a modern marketing program.
• The campaign expanded the electorate with broad messages while targeting specific demographics through multimedia tactics using both online and offline media.
• The Internet served as the campaign's "central nervous system" for PR, advertising, fundraising, and organizing.
• A guiding philosophy was to "build online tools to help people self-organize and then get out of their way," using technology to empower people.
• Social media platforms and a massive email list were important tools.
• The campaign raised $500 million online from 3 million donors, organized 35,000 groups through My.BarackObama.com, and posted 1,800 videos to YouTube.

Good Marketing

• Good marketing requires careful planning and execution using state-of-the-art tools and techniques.
• It balances discipline and imagination, striving for creative solutions to complex challenges.

Importance of Marketing

• Marketing helps firms prosper financially.
• Financial success depends on marketing ability.
• Marketing introduces new products, enhances existing products, builds demand and creates jobs.
• Successful marketing allows firms to engage in socially responsible activities.
• CEOs recognize marketing's role in building strong brands and a loyal customer base, contributing to the value of a firm.
• Many companies now have a chief marketing officer (CMO) to align marketing better with other C-level executives.

Marketing Challenges

• Making the right marketing decisions is not always easy.
• Many senior marketing executives felt their marketing effectiveness was not where it needed to be.
• Marketers must make decisions about product features, pricing, distribution, and advertising spending.
• Decisions must be made in a rapidly changing environment with consumers, competition, technology, and economic forces.

Domino's Case Study

• Domino's learned about PR and brand communications when employees posted a distasteful video on YouTube.
• The company fired the employees involved.
• There were over a million downloads of the video and negative publicity.
• The company responded with social media.
• The response was because the company realized that the perception of quality for the brand had turned from positive to negative.
• Responding swiftly and decisively is important in an era of connectivity.

Adapting to Market Developments

• Marketers need to understand and adapt to marketplace developments amid budget cuts and pressure to make every marketing dollar count.
• Firms that fail to monitor customers and competitors, improve value offerings, or satisfy stakeholders face risks.

Marketing Examples

• OfficeMax promoted a new line of products with web videos and local experts.
• eBay promoted its "Let's Make a Daily Deal" promotion by recreating the Let's Make a Deal TV game show.
• Johnson & Johnson launched BabyCenter.com to help new parents.

Definition of Marketing

• Marketing identifies and meets human and social needs.
• A good definition of marketing is "meeting needs profitably."
• The American Marketing Association defines marketing as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society.
• Marketing management involves choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through superior customer value.
• Marketing aims to understand the customer so well that the product or service sells itself.
• Ideally, marketing results in a customer who is ready to buy.

What Is Marketed

• Marketers market goods, services, events, experiences, persons, places, properties, organizations, information, and ideas.

Goods

• Physical goods constitute the bulk of most countries’ production and marketing efforts.

Services

• A growing proportion of economic activities focuses on the production of services.
• Services include the work of airlines, hotels, car rental firms, barbers and beauticians, maintenance and repair people, and accountants, bankers, lawyers, engineers, doctors, software programmers, and management consultants.

Events

• Marketers promote time-based events, such as major trade shows, artistic performances, and company anniversaries.

Experiences

• Firms can create, stage, and market experiences by orchestrating services and goods.

Persons

• Artists, musicians, CEOs, physicians, high-profile lawyers and financiers, and other professionals can be considered people that can be marketed.

Places

• Cities, states, regions, and whole nations compete to attract tourists, residents, factories, and company headquarters.

Properties

• Properties are intangible rights of ownership to either real property (real estate) or financial property (stocks and bonds).

Organizations

• Organizations work to build a strong, favorable, and unique image in the minds of their target publics.

Information

• The production, packaging, and distribution of information are major industries.

Ideas

• Every market offering includes a basic idea that delivers some idea or benefit.
• Social marketers promote ideas such as "Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk".