The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to marketing:
Marketing – social and managerial processes by which products, services, and value are exchanged in order to fulfill individuals' or groups' needs and wants. These processes include, but are not limited to, advertising, promotion, distribution, and product management.
At the center of the marketing framework is the consumer lies the relationship between the consumer and the organization with the implication that marketers must manage the way the organization presents its public face.
Selling situations & relationships: Depending on the nature of the business operations, many different types of actors are involved in a variety of selling situations involving a variety of sales personnel, who perform varied sales roles. Sales activities involve many different types of customer relationships - from simple transactional exchange through to long-term, enduring customer relationships.
Marketers typically begin planning with a detailed understanding of customer needs and wants.
A need is something required for a healthy life (e.g. food, water, shelter, emotional bonding); A want is a desire, wish or aspiration; When needs or wants are backed by purchasing power, they have the potential to become demands.
Traditional thinking around the concept of value was that marketers created value through innovation, product design and manufacture and that Utility was embedded in products or services offered for sale. In this type of thinking, marketer's objective was to communicate a value proposition to potential buyers. However, recent thinking has changed the traditional perspective and now recognizes that consumers may participate in the co-creation of value in a variety of ways. Consumers may derive value through usage and experience, known as value-in-use or may be involved in product design, known as participatory design.
Given that marketing has its roots in economics, it shares many foundation concepts with that discipline. Most practicing marketers will have a working knowledge of basic economic concepts and theories.
In Western economies, the capitalist economy dominates. However, other types of economic systems such as barter economies and the Sharing economy can be identified.
Marketing planning is just one facet of the overall company's planning. Marketing plans must therefore take their guidance from the overall strategic plan or business plan. Most companies produce both a strategic plan and a managerial plan (also known as an operational plan). The distinction between strategic planning and management planning is that they are two phases with different goals.
Strategic planning is fundamentally concerned with the policies that will improve the firm's competitive position. Strategic planning is sometimes called higher-order planning and is usually long-term planning (say 3–7 years) while management planning is short-term and may be carried out for a specific program (e.g. a sales or advertising campaign of a few weeks duration) or carried out annually. Strategic plans typically include a statement of the firm's vision and mission. The Marketing strategy is a plan that shows how the firm's marketing activities will help to achieve the overall strategic goals.
Marketing management is focused on developing the marketing program or Marketing mix (also known as the 4Ps) and is concerned with the implementation of specific action plans designed to achieve objective, measurable targets (SMART objectives). Marketing management plans are typically prepared on an annual planning cycle, but may be prepared for shorter periods for special events such as a product launch, a new logo, change to corporate livery or a repositioning campaign.
Strategic planning requires sophisticated research and analysis to document the firm's current situation as well as to identify opportunities with the potential to be developed.
Marketers draw on a very wide variety of techniques and tools when analyzing the market and the broader operating conditions. The technique selected depends on the nature of the situation or problem to be investigated and the analyst's skill and experience. Strategic analysts employ some 200 different quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques including:[4]
Implementations and control is an important feature of the planning process. From time to time, marketers will use appropriate measures of performance to gauge whether plans are achieving the desired results. If necessary, corrective action can be taken to get back on track.
The book titled, The Marketing Book, 7th ed., Routledge, Oxon, UK, 2016 edited by Michael J. Baker and Susan Hart identifies the distinct branches of marketing practice as:
For a more detailed breakdown of the relevant topics for each of these key branches of marketing, see Branches of Marketing: Detailed Topics on this page. For special applications of marketing including marketing of specific types of products (e.g. agricultural marketing, faith based marketing, pharmaceutical marketing, political marketing, sports marketing, etc.,) or marketing to specific target groups (e.g. marketing to children, marketing to older people, LBGT marketing) see: Special applications of marketing practice).
Marketing orientations are the philosophies or mindsets that guide and shape marketing planning and marketing practice. Some marketing historians believe that different philosophies have informed marketing practice at different times in marketing's history. Although there is no real agreement amongst scholars about the precise nature or number of distinct marketing orientations, the most commonly cited include:
Marketing planning or the process of developing a marketing program requires a detailed understanding of the marketing framework including Consumer behavior; Market segmentation and Marketing research. In the process of understanding the consumer market to be served, marketers may need to consider such issues as:
Marketing research refers to research activities designed to understand the marketing environment, including competitors, the socio-cultural environment and the politico-legal operating environment. Market research specifically refers to research concerned with understanding the market, that is consumers and is designed to yield actionable customer insights.
To support, market segmentation analysis marketers may require access to databases with large sample sizes. A number of commercial companies provide such data which typically includes proprietary software designed to interrogate the data and backed by algorithms that support different types of segmentation approaches. These commercial databases are often country or region specifically.
Popular geo-demographic segmentation databases include:
A recent trend in NPD is the use of participatory design, also known as co-design or co-operative design, which involves stakeholders such as employees or consumers in the design process.
NPD represents a high risk activity. It requires substantial investment and a list of product failures suggests that the probability of failure is relatively high.
New product adoption and diffusion
In order to develop a superior understanding of how new products are adopted by the market place and the factors that influence adoption rates, marketers often turn to a number of models or theories of the adoption/diffusion process:
New product development, including the design of product features, manufacturing processes, packaging design etc. involves creative work and therefore constitutes intellectual property. A number of different legal avenues are available to protect different types of intellectual property.
The extended marketing mix is used in the marketing of services, ideas and customer experiences and typically refers to a model of 7 Ps and includes the original 4 Ps plus process, physical evidence and people. Some texts use a model of 8 Ps and include performance level (service quality) as an 8th P.
Marketing activities are costly and represent an investment in a company or brand's long term future. With the increased emphasis on accountability, marketers must consider how they measure marketing's performance and communicate that to stakeholders. Various types of metrics that are in widespread use may be classified as:
Wroe Alderson (1898-1965) - proponent of marketing science; instrumental in developing the functional school of marketing and in the managerial approach to marketing
Igor Ansoff (1918-2002) - marketing/ management strategist; noted for the product/market growth matrix
David Aaker - highly awarded educator and author in the area of marketing and organisational theory
N.W. Ayer - probably the first advertiser to use mass media (i.e. telegraph) in a promotional campaign and early proponent of media scheduling
Leonard Berry (professor) (1942- ) - author and educator with strong interest in health marketing and relationship marketing
Neil H. Borden (1922-1962) - coined the term, 'marketing mix'; former President of the American Marketing Association
Clayton Christensen - educator, author and consultant, published in the areas of innovation and entrepreneurship
George S. Day - author and educator; has published in the area of strategic marketing
Ernest Dichter (1907-1991) - market researcher, consumer behaviourist, pioneer of motivational research methods
Andrew S. C. Ehrenberg (1926-2010) - made contributions to the methodology of data collection, analysis and presentation, and an understanding buyer behaviour and how advertising works
Edward Filene (1860-1937) - early pioneer of modern retailing methods
Seth Godin - popular author, entrepreneur, public speaker and marketer
Paul E. Green (1927-2012) - academic and author; the founder of conjoint analysis and popularised the use of multidimensional scaling, clustering, and analysis of qualitative data in marketing.
Shelby D. Hunt (1939- ) -former editor of the Journal of Marketing and organisational theorist noted for his contributions to RA theory
John E. Jeuck (1916-2009) - early marketing educator
Philip Kotler (1931-) - popularised the managerial approach to marketing; prolific author
Christopher Lovelock (1940-2008) - author of many books and articles on services marketing
Theodore Levitt (1925-2006) - former editor of Harvard Business Review, prolific author of marketing articles and famed for his article, "Marketing Myopia"
E. Jerome McCarthy - popularised the managerial approach to marketing; developed the concept of the 4Ps (i.e. the 'marketing mix' or marketing program)
Arthur Nielsen (1897–1980) - early market researcher; pioneered methods for estimating radio and TV audiences and ratings
David Ogilvy (1911-1999)- advertising guru, early pioneer of the market positioning concept
Vance Packard - journalist and author, wrote The Hidden Persuaders (1957) which explored the use of motivational research in marketing practice
Richard S. Tedlow - author and educator; published in the area of marketing history
James Walter Thompson (1847-1928) - founded one of the earliest modern advertising agencies, J Walter Thompson; a very early proponent of using brand image in advertising
Jack Trout - together with Al Ries, popularised the positioning concept
Don E. Schultz - father of 'integrated marketing communications' (IMC)
Henry Grady Weaver (1889-1949) - developed the survey questionnaire for use in market research
Jerry (Yoram) Wind - former editor of the Journal of Marketing, educator and marketer
Byron Sharp - N.Z. academic; one of the first to document buyer loyalty in empirical work
Daniel Starch (1883–1979) - psychologist and marketing researcher, developed the so-called Starch scores to measure impact of magazine advertising; Starch scores are still in use
Gerald Zaltman - developed the Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET)
Valarie Zeithaml - together with A. Parasurman and L.L. Berry, developed the model of service quality and the SERVQUAL research instrument
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