Marketing tips

Marketing Technique

Marketing is a societal process which discerns
consumers' wants, focusing on a product or service to fulfill those wants,
attempting to move the consumers toward the products or services offered.
Marketing is fundamental to any businesses growth. The marketing teams
(marketers) are tasked to create consumer awareness of the products or services
through marketing techniques. Unless it pays due attention to its products and
services and consumers' demographics and desires, a business will not usually
prosper over time.

Marketing tends to be seen as a creative industry, which
includes advertising, distribution and selling. It is also concerned with
anticipating the customers' future needs and wants, which are often discovered
through market research.

Marketing communications

Marketing
communications breaks down the strategies involved with marketing messages into
categories based on the goals of each message. There are distinct stages in
converting strangers to customers that govern the communication medium that
should be used.

Advertising

·
Paid form of public presentation and expressive
promotion of ideas

·
Aimed at masses

·
Manufacturer may determine what goes into
advertisement

·
Pervasive and impersonal medium

Functions
and advantages of successful advertising

·
Task of the salesman made easier

·
Forces manufacturer to live up to conveyed image

·
Protects and warns customers against false claims
and inferior products

·
Enables manufacturer to mass-produce product

·
Continuous reminder

·
Uninterrupted production a possibility

·
Increases goodwill

·
Raises standards of living (or perceptions
thereof)

·
Prices decrease with increased popularity

·
Educates manufacturer and wholesaler about
competitors' offerings as well as shortcomings in their own.

Objectives

·
Maintain demand for well-known goods

·
Introduce new and unknown goods

·
Increase demand for well-known goods

Requirements
of a good advertisement

·
Attract attention (awareness)

·
Stimulate interest

·
Create a desire

·
Bring about action

Eight steps
in an advertising campaign

·
Market research

·
Setting out aims

·
Budgeting

·
Choice of media (TV,newspaper,radio)

·
Choice of actors (New Trend)

·
Design and wording

·
Coordination

·
Test results

Personal sales

Oral
presentation given by a salesman who approaches individuals or a group of
potential customers:

·
Live, interactive relationship

·
Personal interest

·
Attention and response

·
Interesting presentation

Sales promotion

Short-term
incentives to encourage buying of products:

·
Instant appeal

·
Anxiety to sell

Marketing Public Relations (MPR)

·
Stimulation of demand through press release giving
a favourable report to a product

·
Higher degree of credibility

·
Effectively news

·
Boosts enterprise's image

Product focus

In a product
innovation approach, the company pursues product innovation, then tries to
develop a market for the product. Product innovation drives the process and
marketing research is conducted primarily to ensure that a profitable market
segment(s) exists for the innovation. The rationale is that customers may not
know what options will be available to them in the future so we should not
expect them to tell us what they will buy in the future. However, marketers can
aggressively over-pursue product innovation and try to overcapitalize on a
niche. When pursuing a product innovation approach, marketers must ensure that
they have a varied and multi-tiered approach to product innovation. It is
claimed that if Thomas Edison depended on marketing research he would have
produced larger candles rather than inventing light bulbs. Many firms, such as
research and development focused companies, successfully focus on product
innovation (Such as Nintendo who constantly change the way Video games are
played). Many purists doubt whether this is really a form of marketing
orientation at all, because of the ex post status of consumer research. Some
even question whether it is marketing.

·
An emerging area of study and practice concerns
internal marketing, or how employees are trained and managed to deliver the
brand in a way that positively impacts the acquisition and retention of
customers (employer branding).

·
Diffusion of innovations research explores how and
why people adopt new products, services and ideas.

·
A relatively new form of marketing uses the
Internet and is called internet marketing or more generally e-marketing,
affiliate marketing, desktop advertising or online marketing. It typically tries
to perfect the segmentation strategy used in traditional marketing. It targets
its audience more precisely, and is sometimes called personalized marketing or
one-to-one marketing.

·
With consumers' eroding attention span and
willingness to give time to advertising messages, marketers are turning to forms
of Permission marketing such as Branded content, Custom media and Reality
marketing.

·
The use of herd behavior in marketing.

In an article entitled "Swarming the shelves: How shops can
exploit people's herd mentality to increase sales", The Economist
recently reported a recent conference in Rome on the subject of the simulation
of adaptive human behavior.^[4] Mechanisms to increase impulse buying
and get people "to buy more by playing on the herd instinct" were shared. The
basic idea is that people will buy more of products that are seen to be popular,
and several feedback mechanisms to get product popularity information to
consumers are mentioned, including smart-cart technology and the use of Radio
Frequency Identification Tag technology. A "swarm-moves" model was introduced by
a Princeton researcher, which is appealing to supermarkets because it can
"increase sales without the need to give people discounts." Large retailers
Wal-Mart in the United States and Tesco in Britain plan to test the technology
in spring 2007 .

Other recent studies on the "power of social influence" include
an "artificial music market in which some 14,000 people downloaded previously
unknown songs" (Columbia University, New York); a Japanese chain of convenience
stores which orders its products based on "sales data from department stores and
research companies;" a Massachusetts company exploiting knowledge of social
networking to improve sales; and online retailers who are increasingly informing
consumers about "which products are popular with like-minded consumers"

For more information contact
your business expert Rags Bhandari at

ranirags@gamil.com Thanks for visiting.