Ransford Advanced Diploma course In Marketing Management

 Companies selling business goods and services often face well-informed professional buyers skilled at evaluating competitive offerings. Advertising and Web sites can play a role, but the sales force, the price, and the seller’s reputation may play a greater one.   The term business, business-to-business or industrial marketing focuses on understanding business buying centres and on how businesses purchase in different ways to consumers – further explored in Chapter 8. Business markets are now networked organizations operating in a complex environment. Nowadays the focus is on neither consumer or business markets but on recognizing that the lines between the two are blurring in four important ways: A blurring of value chains through outsourcing and other relationships that allows networks of companies and customers to operate. When Apple set up its iTunes online music store, it brought together recording companies with music and customers who wanted to download music tracks f...

 Companies selling mass consumer goods and services such as juices, cosmetics, athletic shoes, and air travel establish a strong brand image by developing a superior product or service, ensuring its availability, and backing it with engaging communications and reliable performance. Consumer purchases are generally made by individual decision makers or a decision-making unit, either for themselves or for others with whom they have relationships. The consumer market is made up of companies marketing consumer products and services as diverse as soft drinks (Red Bull), make-up (L’Oréal), air travel (AirFranceKLM), shoes (Clarks) and car insurance (the Automobile Association). Consumer markets are enormous. Consumer purchasing power within the European Union has grown to the point where it is slightly larger than that of the United States. Germany, with a population of 82 million, is Europe’s largest consumer market with consumer purchasing power estimated to be €1495 billion, or 19.5 ...

Consider the following key customer markets: consumer, business, global, and nonprofit.   Consumer Markets: Companies selling mass consumer goods and services such as juices, cosmetics, athletic shoes, and air travel establish a strong brand image by developing a superior product or service, ensuring its availability, and backing it with engaging communications and reliable performance. Business Markets: Companies selling business goods and services often face well-informed professional buyers skilled at evaluating competitive offerings. Advertising and Web sites can play a role, but the sales force, the price, and the seller’s reputation may play a greater one. Global Markets: Companies in the global marketplace navigate cultural, language, legal, and political differences while deciding which countries to enter, how to enter each (as exporter, licenser, joint venture partner, contract manufacturer, or solo manufacturer), how to adapt product and service features to each country,...

 Traditionally, a “market” was a physical place where buyers and sellers gathered to buy and sell goods. Economists describe a market as a collection of buyers and sellers who transact over a particular product or product class (such as the housing market or the grain market). Five basic markets and their connecting flows are shown in below. Manufacturers go to resource markets (raw material markets, labor markets, money markets), buy resources and turn them into goods and services, and sell finished products to intermediaries, who sell them to consumers. Consumers sell their labor and receive money with which they pay for goods and services. The government collects tax revenues to buy goods from resource, manufacturer, and intermediary markets and uses these goods and services to provide public services.     Each nation’s economy, and the global economy, consists of interacting sets of markets linked through exchange processes. Marketers view sellers as the industry and...

 A marketer is someone who seeks a response—attention, a purchase, a vote, a donation—from another party, called the prospect. If two parties are seeking to sell something to each other, we call them both marketers.   Marketers are skilled at stimulating demand for their products, but that’s a limited view of what they do. They also seek to influence the level, timing, and composition of demand to meet the organization’s objectives. Eight demand states are possible: 1. Negative demand—Consumers dislike the product and may even pay to avoid it. 2. Nonexistent demand—Consumers may be unaware of or uninterested in the product. 3. Latent demand—Consumers may share a strong need that cannot be satisfied by an existing product. 4. Declining demand—Consumers begin to buy the product less frequently or not at all. 5. Irregular demand—Consumer purchases vary on a seasonal, monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly basis. 6. Full demand—Consumers are adequately buying all products put int...

 Marketers must have a variety of skills, one in particular being the ability to stimulate demand for their company’s services and products. However, this is too limited a view of the tasks that marketers perform and the skills that they must have. Just as production and logistics professionals are responsible for supply management, marketers are responsible for demand management along with their other roles. Marketing managers seek to influence the level, timing, and composition of demand to meet the organizations objectives. Eight states of market demand are possible:   Full demand: Consumers buy all services or products brought to market. Overfull demand: There are more consumers demanding the service or product than can be satisfied. Irregular demand: Consumer purchases vary on a seasonal, monthly, weekly, daily or even hourly basis.  Declining demand: Consumers begin to buy the service or product less frequently or not at all. Negative demand: Consumers dislike the s...

 Properties are intangible rights of ownership to either real property (real estate) or financial property (stocks and bonds). They are bought and sold, and these exchanges require marketing. Real estate agents work for property owners or sellers, or they buy and sell residential or commercial real estate. Investment companies and banks market securities to both institutional and individual investors.  

 Museums, performing arts organizations, corporations, and nonprofits all use marketing to boost their public images and compete for audiences and funds. Some universities have created chief marketing officer (CMO) positions to better manage their school identity and image, via everything from admission brochures and Twitter feeds to brand strategy.  

 Information is essentially what books, schools, and universities produce, market, and distribute at a price to parents, students, and communities. Firms make business decisions using information supplied by organizations like Thomson Reuters: “We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, healthcare, science and media markets, powered by the world’s most trusted news organization  

 Every market offering includes a basic idea. Charles Revson of Revlon once observed: “In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope.” Products and services are platforms for delivering some idea or benefit. Social marketers promote such ideas as “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” and “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste.”  

Cities, states, regions and whole nations compete actively to attract tourists, factories, company headquarters and new residents. Europe is the most visited region in the world.  Six European countries are in the world’s top ten destinations for holiday makers.   Place marketing includes a full marketing programme to attract both tourism and inward economic investment, often called foreign direct investment (FDI). Ireland’s extraordinary economic growth in the past decade, leading the country to be called the ‘Celtic Tiger’, attracted an estimated 30 per cent of the global spend on FDI. The ‘Cool Britannia’ campaign tried to promote Britain as a cool place to visit and in which to invest.

Celebrity marketing is a major business. Artists, musicians, chefs, CEOs, financiers and other professionals can all become celebrities through clever marketing. Some people have done a masterful job of marketing themselves and becoming global celebrities – think of David Beckham, Bono, Jordan and Carla Bruni. Within the United Kingdom, chefs such as Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson have all become household names, with their own brands of restaurants, cookbooks and kitchen utensils.  Similarly, Spanish actors Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, who were national celebrities in their native Spain, became global celebrities after working in Hollywood in English-speaking films. Celebrity culture is embedded in contemporary European culture, with nearly 3 million celebrity magazines sold each week in Britain, compared with 7.5 million in the United States, a country with five times the population.      Kate Moss, the English supermodel, launched her 5th li...

 By managing several services and products, a firm can create, stage and market experiences. Alton Towers – the most popular theme park in the United Kingdom – or Disneyland Resort Paris or Legoland in Denmark, Germany and England, all represent this kind of experiential marketing, allowing customers to visit a fairy kingdom, a pirate ship, a Lego town or a haunted house, complete with hotel accommodation and food. There is also a growing market or customised experiences, such as spending a week at a Samba Soccer camp, on a yoga retreat in Kitzbühel, Austria, or skiing on Mount Blanc in the Alps.    

Music shows such as the U2 Zoo tour, the Hurricane music festival in Germany, the Frankfurt book fair and major trade fairs or international summits, for example the global health conference, are all global marketing events that take months to plan and market. Global sporting events such as the Olympics and the World Cup Football are marketed to both companies and fans.  Event marketing is big business, as evidenced by the estimated loss of £2 billion to the British economy when the England team failed to qualify for Euro 2008. The 2006 Football World Cup was one of the most watched events in television history, with over 26 billion viewers over the course of the tournament. The final attracted an estimated audience of 715.1 million people who watched Italy claim their fourth World Cup title.  

 The service-dominant logic suggests that the separation between products and services is not a clear one. The ‘servicisation’ of products refers to the relative importance of the service dimension in a given product offering. Thinking in marketing has moved from a strategy that conceives of either a product or a service to one which sees both product and service dimensions in any market offering.  Many products have a service component and many services have product components. Take for example a physical product such as a car. We purchase a car, which provides the service of getting from one place to another. But the car comes with its own need for services such as insurance, finance, repairs and even a petrol station.  The Swedish car manufacturer Volvo has built a service into its cars that alerts the driver if they are falling asleep.      What a great service! Another example is a mobile phone provider such as Nokia. The company provides a product (m...

 The manufacture of physical products was the traditional cornerstone of economic activity in Europe. Marketing has always oriented towards the marketing of products, reflecting its historical development in the agricultural sector.  European companies manufacture and market billions of fresh, canned, bagged and frozen food products, and millions of cars, refrigerators, television sets, machines and various other mainstays of a modern economy.

 A growing proportion of economic activity focuses on the provision of services. The current list of Fortune 500 companies contains more service companies and fewer manufacturers than in previous decades. The European economy, as a mature economy, consists of a 70–30 services-to- product GDP ratio. Services are everywhere.  Services include airlines, hotels, car hire, hairdressers and beauticians, maintenance and repair, accountants, bankers, solicitors, engineers, doctors, software programmers and management consultants to name but a few.     Many market offerings consist of a variable mix of products and services. At a fast-food restaurant, for example, the customer consumes both a product and a service. According to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the services sector accounts globally for €1 trillion of world trade. Over two-thirds of the workforce in Europe are employed in services and between 60 and 70 per cent of the gross value-added figure achieved...

 Some business people who don’t understand marketing think of marketing as ‘the art of selling products’, or simplistically equate it with advertising. Both of these are marketing tactics visible to the consumer.    Many people are surprised when they hear that selling is not the most important part of marketing and that not all companies have large advertising budgets. Selling and advertising are only the tip of the marketing iceberg.    Most of what occurs in marketing happens before the customer sees an advertisement (which is just the tangible representation of the marketing strategy), hears about a new product or service or meets a sales representative.   Just like an iceberg, over 80 or 90 per cent of marketing occurs out of the sight of the consumer. Advertising, sales and so on are the final rather than the beginning stages of marketing.   As Ralph A. Clevenger / Corbis puts it:    The main focus of marketing is on what occurs below t...

 To prepare to be a marketing manager, you need to understand what marketing is, how it works, what is marketed, and who does the marketing. What is marketing?  Marketing is about identifying and meeting human and social needs. One of the shortest definitions of marketing is the process of ‘meeting needs profitably’. This has been called balanced centricity – which is a focus on the customer but also on the company and its objectives.    When the Swedish company IKEA noticed that people wanted good furniture at a substantially lower price, they created well-designed, low-priced furniture.        When Nokia realized that phone design was crucial and began to design its own range of clam shell phones the company captured part of a growing market.        These companies demonstrated marketing savvy and expertise in turning a private or social need into a profitable business opportunity. Marketing is a revenue-generating function o...

 Benetton, which for years had enjoyed great success with a unique brand of clothing and provocative advertising, had to rethink its marketing strategy when new fast fashion competitors such as Zara and H&M entered the young fashion market and started capturing market share and brand loyalty through a comprehensive marketing strategy.    Zara understood the new patterns of consumer behaviour of teenagers and young adults – markets that craved new styles quickly and cheaply and were happy with ‘disposable clothing’. Zara studied the marketing mix variables and saw that global supply network management, service process and physical evidence such as store layout and design were more important than traditional marketing expenditure on advertising.       Zara’s advertising budget is 0.03 per cent of its revenues, which is very different to Benetton that focused on creative advertising, spending €80 million on advertising alone. Benetton has now seen the erro...

 Marketing Professor, Philip Kotler and his research colleagues help us understand that Marketing is a significant dimension of any business in today’s highly competitive environment and financial success is often dependent on marketing ability.    Finance, operations, accounting, administration and other business functions will not really matter if companies do not understand consumer needs and identify sufficient demand for their products and services for them to make a profit.   Companies of all kinds – from consumer product manufacturers (such as Nokia or Ericsson in Sweden), to health care insurers (e.g. Bupa in the United Kingdom), from car manufacturers (e.g. BMW or Porsche in Germany) to banks (such as Société Générale in France or RaboBank in Holland), from non profit organisations (Amnesty International, which was founded by a British lawyer) to industrial product manufacturers (e.g. Airbus – a French, German, English and Spanish conglomerate) – all have to...

Marketing is engaging customers an d managing profitable customer relationships.     Marketing is about identifying and meeting human and social needs. One of the shortest good definitions of marketing is “meeting needs profitably.” When Google recognized that people needed to more effectively and efficiently access information on the Internet, it created a powerful search engine that organized and prioritized queries.   When IKEA noticed that people wanted good furnishings at substantially lower prices, it created knockdown furniture. These two firms demonstrated marketing savvy and turned a private or social need into a profitable business opportunity.   The aim of marketing is to create value for customers in order to capture value from customers in return.    Marketing management is a challenging and rewarding career choice because it is a core management function central to all company efforts. Successful marketing of products and services both loc...