The Marketing Manager in Training Tells All...

Final Thoughts

So after all of the lectures, all of the simulation, and all of the Drucker...it's time to take a look back at what marketing actually means to me.

What is Marketing?

One of the main drivers behind my marketing knowledge came from the wisdom of Peter Drucker. Drucker himself stated that the two basic functions of business are marketing and innovation. Everything else are just costs. The purpose of a business is to create customers, who then in turn create quality. Since marketing and innovation develope and grow the customer base, a business ha no purpose without either of these functions. Some may be misconcieved, but marketing really is essential to business success!

Marketing can be present in many forms. It is seen as a funtion, it has a process, and has an orientation. The funstion of marketing is to help create the customers, which correlates to a business purpose as already stated. A marketing process is quite expansive and can go as long as a company needs it to. This means analysis of the product and its market, creating a marketing plan, and implementing decisions made off of these decisions. Using the 5 C's in marketing analysis helps a business segment, target, and position itslef in the market. This then leads to the marketing mix, using the 4 P's, to learn the market and create the product or service's value among consumers. Market orientation is important in this process. It is customer and competition focused. It should be integrated through the firm with cross functional teams that take care of the many aspects a business need to correctly implement its product or service. With proper market orientation (knowing who to market to and how to market it) will, hopefully, lead to customer satisfaction and retention. This of course leads to what all businesses really like, profit.

While this is a condensed version of marketing, it surely shows that it's certainly bigger than what it's commonly thought out to be. Some see financials as being the big factor, or managemsnt strategy taking precedence. But after all is said and done, marketing is behind the essense of it all, as you can see. Without marketing, and of course innovation, business can't grow in the long run.

What Else is New?

Well, as I said before Drucker was a big influence in the teachings of this class. His "Druckerisms", along with other ideas, brought some very influenceing ideas. For example, through Drucker we learn that qualtiy is only defined through the eyes of the consumer. Knowing what they value, thus looking into the market to define how to fit in the product or service, will help to create a value in the product/service. With the purpose of business being to create consumers, there's no better way to attract them than by knowing what they value and giving them something that fits that mold.

It is also important to maintain integrity within the company. Drucker says it may cost you at some times, but it's worth it. Maintaining values, not necessarily listening to the crowd or what they do, keeps one true to themself. This can in some ways influence that innovation you need to outdo competition.

when it comes to professionalism in the company, many focus on the short term of marketing functionallity. This means seeing high sales is the end of the line where they see no need for other factors after the sales, such as customer service or continued analysis and strategy revison. This can result in long-term suffering. And just as bad, if a company is to reward based on an individual's skillset or intricacies, rather than what they contribute or can bring to the company as a whole, it can certainly hurt the future structure of business decisions and strategies made by the company. Beware!

In terms of customers, it is important create that customer and sustain that growth in business. As stated before, the purpose of a business is to create consumers. If you try to "buy" the consumer by temporarily cover up a problem, such as lowering the price, without actually analyzing the situation, the product, and the market, then there will just be more problems and probably less consumers. It is important to think through and decide on what is trying to be done.

The best part about the lessons learned, not just from Drucker but other established professionals in the management and marketing world, is that marketing must include many areas. If a company focuses on just financial earnings or simply specific areas, then the company won't be working together for a purpose. They have to be integrated to ensure that the decisions being made are geared towards the impact on the consumer and the market.

The End...or the Beginning?

My lessons have now come to a close, and I can't wait to take this information along with me as I continue to enter the business world. Knowing the true funtions and processes of marketing will help make business decisions in the future that much more successful. Now join me in getting out there and putting these lessons to use!!!

Revising A Strategy

When marketing a product, it is important to constantly monitor and adapt the marketing strategy to ensure improvment of the product performance in the market. One of the ways to ensure proper adaptation, a proper analysis must be conducted every so often.

When working on our Pharmasim simulation, we came to a point where we needed to use a strategy revision to reanalyze different areas of our marketing strategy. The first thing we did was to perform another up-to-date situation analysis. This allowed us to see what areas of our strategy were working to plan and which areas still needed improvement.

From this analysis, we performed a SWUFT analysis that showed us our strengths, weaknesses, favorable trends, and unfavorable trends. We were able to map out in an organized fashion Allround and Allround + products in the cold medecine market. We had quite a lot of strengths including increasing brand awareness, increase in revenues, high satisfaction, strong unit sales, and other helpful areas. We did realize that there was improvement in areas such as our MEI, capacity utilization, and better allocation in sales force, promotion, and advertising. Taking all of these elements into consideration, along with the analysis of the market trends, we were then able to sort out our key issues, our goals and objectives, and finally our new revisions and implementations.

After all of the instrumental revisions made, we came to the conclusion that there were areas that we were performing well with, and there were certainly areas of the strategy that we needed to change in order to gain more success in the market. Those areas where we saw success were our areas of channel sales. With grocery store sales leading the market and chain and independent drug stores falling close behind, we know that is why were finding an increase in our manufacturer sales. These areas, along with a healthy inclusion in other weaker channels allowed an increase in our sales. Shopping habbits are a good correlation to base these choices off of, and for that we found success. Another area we saw fit to capitalze on was the push strategy for our prodcuts. These had been proven successful by our brand awareness and again manufacturer sales.

As said before, the analysis and revision also made us aware of areas to improve on. These areas we found needing improvement were our cost of goods sold and our promotional allowances. Because we couldn't control the plant expansion implemented in periods 3-7, it increased our costs. But the production costs led into our COGS which was starting to eat at our overall net income. Better allocation in our promotional allowances, which we noticed to be above industry average and increaseing, was also a factor that was cutting into our net income. we needed to make better decisions in these areas so that these issues didn't end up translating into negative factors down the road. Better allocation in terms of our promotion, advertising, and hopefully cost of goods sold (though we couldn't directly control it), should have allowed us to gain a more appropriate response from our customers, thus correlating to higher sales, bigger profits, and better market share for Allstar Brands.

The strategy revision was a very helpful process. It opened our eyes up to areas that we wouldn't have seen as causing possible problems in the future. It also showed us where we doing the right things, and where we may have been over/under estimating on our initial marketing strategy. If you are ever marketing a product, or multiple products for a company for that matter, a strategy revision is essential to ensure effective and successful management of a marketing strategy. Marketing managers must certainly take advantage of this process.

Good Examples of Market Strategy - Travelwire.com

What is Good Marketing?

Examples of marketing are popping up in the news every day all around the world. In order to model a good business strategy, or even just see what a good marketing plan looks like, it can help to look at companies that are successful as well as those facing problems. By learning from their successes and faults, a marketer can see what does and doesn't work in the real life business industry.

Example

I recently have come across an article on PRWeb.com about a new marketing strategy for Travelwire Inc. Travelwire continues to position itself as a leader in online travel booking sites. The reason why it is recently in the news is because of its new partnership with one of Jamaica's best business advertising and events promotion companies, Outdeh.com. This partnership was made to promote the company's marketing campaign within the Carribean, U.S., Canada, and UK markets.  

According to founder Oliver Huie, "Travelwire is focused on brand positioning and finding unique ways to market our vacation packages to a variety of audiences and we believe the partnership with OutDeh.com represents that. They have a vibrant and experienced marketing team with a strong fan and customer base and we want to communicate our message of being an affordable online travel booking provider to their audience." This partnership includes discount pacjages to cutsomers using Travelwire.com as the preferred vendor for all travel related booking and Travelwire would also be Outdeh.com’s preferred travel partner for all their events. This marketing strategy is very smart and I'll tell you why.

When a business is selling its prodcut within a market, it is important for the business to know its consumers as well as its competitors. Ensuring good product placement within the market through promotion and advertising can increase the brand awarenss of the company, as well as gain more purchasers form the target market population. This in turn leads to higher revenues, profits, and success.

What Travelwire has done is made a partnership with a marketing and advertising company that has access to several new channels. Channels are selling avenues that a business sells its product or service through. They are the means by which a consumer uses to purchase that product or service. An increase in channel position allows a company to have access to more consumers. With outdeh.com providing access to not only the U.S. market, but the Carribean, Canadian, and UK markets, which are all prime vacation and tourism staples, Travelwide is now able to reach more consumers in their target market that they may not have had as much success in reaching before.

By offering discounts to these outdeh customers, travelwide also increases the value of the service they are providing. A lower price for the same qulaity of service they are providing will draw in customers and potentially satisy them enough to continue useage of the service. Promotion is a key element in developing recognition, awareness, retention, and recruitment. Also, by becoming a "preferred travel partner" not only will outdeh.com customers automatically trust travelwide.com due to outdeh.com's reputation and quality, but travelwide itself will gain brand awareness and brand recognition.

Finally, by bringing in an experienced and vibrant marketing team with a strong customer base, travelwide will be able to effectively allocate resources towards a successful stratgey and market plan. By learning from their new partner, travelwire.com can learn what works well with their target market and consumer base. In this new learning process, they will be able to increase not only the customer base and sales, but they will increase profits as well!

As you can see, an effective implementation of strategy can really increase success for your business. If you're ever wondering what to do to increase your business, take these steps: analyze the market, create a plan and strategy, test that strategy, make revisions of your plan is having different incomes while continuing market analysis, and hopefully see your success take action!

You can find the article on Travelwire here:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/11/prweb11325189.htm

Experience in Simulation

 Pharmasim Periods 3-7

Throughout the completion of Pharmasim periods 3-7, my team partner and I have come across several learning experiences. Before we even started these 5 periods, we were licky enough to have done some ddep analysis into a mini marketing plan. Though at times this process was tiring and time consuming, it did give us a better idea of what to look for in our simulation. It certainly preared us for what was to come.

Entering into period 3, we had a plan in terms of what our marketing strategy would be, what decisions we would make in terms of advertising, promotion, sales force, pricing/price strategy, line extension as well as a timeline we would look at in making specific decisions for our product. For the most part, our predicted timeline has aligned well with the actual simulation processes. Our decisions to increase our advertising and promotion in order to increase brand awareness and sales have worked. Our allocation of sales force also seem to have correlate into greater retailer support, thus more sales. Our pricing has always been higher, which we were worried about, but up to this point we have a good gross margin and our customers see the price at a good tradeoff value.

We have come across some unexpected situations in these periods however. With forecasting, you can never make exact assumptions. No matter what happens, your numbers will not be exact and there's always room for unexpected influences. One of the challenges we have faced is the unpredictability of certain changes. For example, we did not plan for any of the "special" problems that Allround faces. However, we have made good decisions that have worked out for us. With more planning on these decisions, we would have better understanding of how they might affect Allstar. However, the strategic analysis and market planning has enabled us to know our company and product very well, thus allowing us to make on the spot decisions. These situations cover everything from social media, product tampering, and price/discount discrimination.

Another problem we have been having is with our sales force allocation. We have been following our plan well and our products are improving the Allstar Brand. However, even with growth in sales and constant analysis and change in our sales force, we seem to always get a message to consider revising allocation. This message even popped up a lot when I was in practice simulation before we started. It seems that even after analyzing our sales report, the market sales force, channel sales, and other areas, our allocation in sales force for both the Allround and Allround + products are being identified by the simulation.

The last tricky situation we have faced in these periods have to do with our capacity utilization. There will be some periods where we are a certain percentage over utilization, and then other periods where it is of no concern. With an unpredictable budget every period along with different factors such as retail growth and promotional/advertising needs, it is difficult to understand how these factors will indicate demand and retail sales for each period. The fact that we are not over on some periods shows that our decisions do get better and allow the company to stay under utilization, but then there will be the random periods where we are over. We are having trouble identifying how to keep utilization down for all periods.

Periods 3-7 have taugth me that preparation is key. Understanding your product, the market, the competitors, and the consumers is essential if you want to increase brand awareness, increase profit, increase stock price; whatever the company goals are. Making sure that you plan out these goals and steps to take ahead of time make the marketing process easier and allows the marketers to understand the product and the influential factors that can make success.

Marketing Metrics

Marekting metrics are very valuable to a marketing manager. These metrics help to evaluate a marketing strategy. The follwing list is what I think are good measuring tools for analysis, but do not limit yourself to these alone! Everyone has different analysis techniques, just make sure whatever you are analyzing will give effective and knowledgable results.

Market Share - Share Position
When a company has a product within a market, competitors will battle for a position among that market with them. One way to measure your effectiveness in marketing is to look at your brand's share within the market. This means what percentage of the market that you alone own as compared with other competitors. A higher share means higher sales and profits. Knowing where you are in market share and where other competitors lie will help make decisions in terms of promotion, advertising, and pricing.

Brand Awareness
This metric is the extent to which a brand is recognized by its potential customers. Brand awareness is the primary goal of a product's early months of introduction to the market. This numebr is a percentage of the target market. Correct analysis of brand awareness can allow a company to efficiently increase/decrease in areas they see effective.

Profitability - Net Income
This metric is pretty simple and self-explanatory. Monitoring one's profits, whcih can be analyzed through net income, allows to see how successful a product is doing sales-wise. Having great sales and low costs creates good profit for a company.

Price
Price can go many ways. There are several pricing strategies that will help drive a product in a certian direction. Choosing an effective strategy is key. Knowing what competition prices their products at will also give a better of idea at how consumers think about pricing and can allow you to make better pricing decisions off of those strengths or weaknesses analyzed.

Marketing Efficiency Index (MEI)
Essentially, the Marketing Efficiency Index is calculated by dividing the net income by marketing expenditures. An MEI of 1 shows that for every $1 a company spends, it is making $1 off of that dollar in net income. An MEI of 2 means it is making $2 off of every $1 spent. The MEI is helpful in planning pricing and budget allocation on marketing and other cost areas.

Units Sold
Units sold allows a company to see their progress in many areas. Marketing, price effectiveness, income/profitability are all areas affected by units sold. How well you are doing will either show that the product is selling well among consumers or not selling as planned. Units sold can also be compared between competition and allow a company to see where it is among success in the market.

All of these metrics, among others, are essential in allowing better decisions in marketing strategy.

Pharmasim Situation Analysis Process

 

Pharmasim Periods 0-2

For those of you who are unaware of what Pharmasim is, it is a computer program that helps a marketing student to analyze and make marketing decisions about a fictional over-the-counter cold medicine company. So far, it has been a very eye opening experience that has helped in connecting the analysis methods learned in class to a real life situation.

Coming into this experience, I was nervous because I had never had such  practical experience that would be so hands on. I had done case work before and analysis of specific points of a decision making process, but never anything this intensive. And that's a good thing! All aspects I have learned in class have given me a better understanding of how a marketing plan works in real life situations. Granted, there is still a long ways to go with the Pharmasim process, I feel like it is making me a stronger analyst and decision maker. And it's great to have a partner in all of this to bounce ideas off of and challenge me as well.

In the beginning of Pharmasim, we were able to do trials and practice how the actual program works. That was huge! I was able to understand how all the buttons and categories meant and did. It certainly helped in my understanding for the beginning of the first part of this assessment.

The situation analysis has by far been the most intensive work I have done so far in graduate school work. The amount of time and research that was necessary in order to make our decisions took a lot of focus and attention. And that was just for Periods 0-2...there's about 8 or 9 more to go! And that's only the beginning. The actual situation analysis took even more time, attention, research, and focus. We had 8 days to make an analysis of what you would think a marketer would do in a few weeks (Well, not necessarily. I'm sure they do it faster. Again, I'm still new to this!). The excel workbook we were able to use to analyze the Five C's, strengths, weaknesses, trends, competition and market information, and issues to address in the future was a great help. Very long and draining, but overall it helped me have an overall in-depth look of our product. And the memo helped me to put all of this information in an organized, practical form. Though this process was stressful and at times frustrating in terms of the amount of time and effort required to go into this, I can't help but admit it was helpful in understanding not only the product and market better, but understanding the practical processes of marketing in general. I never realized how much actually went into something as simple as a situation analysis. It's crazy to see how many different factors go into making future decisions. 

I now feel prepared for the next step in the marketing analysis of the Allstar Brands cold medicine product in Paharmasim. But first, I have to get some sleep...

Buyer Behavior: Needs vs. Wants

The Buyer

The buyer wants and the buyer needs. It all depends on how the organization markets and advertises their service or product. In my line of work, the university is trying to satisfy a need, as well as create a want in a way. 

 

The prectice of higher education has been going on for centuries. Going to college isn't something new. The reason I call a higher education a want is because you don't necessarily need to get a higher education at a college or university in order to be successful and intelligent in life. There are plenty of cases of successful individuals who never got an education. Also, there are positions that do not require a degree that an individual can make a living off of. However, a college education does present a service that one usually cannot get on their own: an education. This is where the need aspect comes in.

The majority of society doesn't have the capability or resources to gain an education beyond high school on their own. One needs someone to teach them experiences, lessons, ideas, and theories at a higher level. An individual wouldn't have this on their own. Also, in order to perform certain jobs or get highered into certain situations, he or she needs a degree from a higher education institution. He or she needs the higher education. More and more people are getting degrees now; it is becoming the normal thing for those to do after graduating high school.

When all is said and done, a higher education does create a want for the reason it is not essential but unique and attractive to the consumer, but for the most part it satisfies a need now that a higher education has become a norm in society. Western New England provides a solution to the consumer's problem. It provides a quality education with vast resources to ensure that consumers, in this case students, are able to gain knowledge, experience, and expertise in their desired fields of study.

Buyer Behavior Process

There are multiple levels of decision making when it comes to buyer behavior. There's Nominal Decision Making, Limited Decision Making, and Extended Decision Making. When it comes to Western New England's market, the consumer is the student. In my opinion, they follow the Extended Decision Making. This decision is at the high end of the purchase involvement scale and requires the most extensive level of evaluation. After graduating high school, a student does a lot of research on different schools. There is an internal search for alternatives and a lot of external research including reading reviews of schools, seeking opinions from alumni or current students, going to college fairs, reading pamphlets, going on websites, etc. Deciding on a school ivolves a large amount of time evaluating all of the different schools a student is interested in. Even after he or she applies, there is still more evaluation and research to do. Even after you make the decision on what school you choose, there is always the post evaluation that occurs too. Was this school the right choice? Are you fitting in well? Does the school really offer what you are looking for?

In this decision making, marketers at the university need to make sure thier advertising is prevelant enough to make sure the school is even considered in the decision making process. It's also important that they provide information through countless other sources such as on websites, in mailings, through the mail, on campus visits, and through commercials. These will aid during the external research phase of the student. Finally, they need to follow up with the students after the "purchase" is made, or in this case once the student accepts his or her enrollment in the school. This is done well at Western New England University through the countless strategies and programs we give to students through countless resources like Residence Life, the First Year Office, Admissions, the individual colleges, the Alumni Office, the Career Center, and many many more. For example, in Residence  Life we present students with programs to involve them more and build a community. This strategy not only is a marketable strategy for retention and growth, but it helps us measure how involved students become. We also offer surveys to see how they are enjoying student life as well as what the University has to offer them. This follow up keeps them involved with the university and gives them a say, as well as ensures them that they made the best decision. These follow ups that each department offers reassures the students' decisions and helps retain themin staying for all four years of an education, and possible more depending if they choose graduate or doctoral studies as well.

What Does This Mean?

Understanding buyer behavior allows an organization to understand the decisions that its consumers make. Understanding their needs allows a marketer to direct its marketing and advertising to those areas. If an organization can understand the wants and needs of the consumer, they can better understand who will want the product or service and how they can go about reaching them and structuring their efforts into knowing what decisions the consmer will make. In doing so, an organization will find success in helping to make those consumer decisions easier for them, in a beneficial way to the organization. If an organization does well with this process, they will create loyal consumers who will purchase the product or service!