In the present age, when skipping of television commercials is merely a matter of pushing a button of television remote and traditional advertisements reach fewer number of people, marketing professionals are increasingly moving away from mass media to word-of-mouth marketing. In addition to the traditional word-of-mouth communications, emerging marketing channels like blogs, buzz, viral and e-mails are gaining popularity as the new electronic word-of-mouth. While a positive word-of-mouth accelerates the acceptance of brands in new markets and reduces brand promotional expenses in existing markets, a negative word-of-mouth may hamper a brand’s acceptance and tarnish its reputation. Since word-of-mouth marketing has been playing a major role in marketing of organizations and some of its aspects are still evolving and have strong potential in future marketing campaigns of organizations, the focus of this article would be to explore issues related to word-of-mouth marketing in developing a strategic marketing plan for an organization. Continue reading
Marketing Management
Marketing management combines the fields of marketing and management. Marketing consists of discovering consumer needs and wants, creating the goods and services that meet those needs and wants; and pricing, promoting, and delivering those goods and services. Doing so requires attention to six major areas – markets, products, prices, places, promotion, and people. Management is getting things done through other people. Managers engage in five key activities – planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling. Marketing management implies the integration of these concepts.
Importance of Advertising
Advertisement is a mass communicating of information intended to persuade buyers to by products with a view to maximizing a company’s profits. Generally, advertising is a relatively low-cost method of conveying selling messages to numerous prospective customers. It can secure leads for salesmen and middlemen by convincing readers to request more information and by identifying outlets handling the product. It can force middlemen to stock the product by building consumer interest. It can help train dealers salesmen in product uses and applications. It can build dealer and consumer confidence in the company and its products by building familiarity. Advertising is to stimulate market demand. While sometimes advertising alone may succeed in achieving buyer acceptance, preference, or even demand for the product, it is seldom solely relied upon. Advertising is efficiently used with at least one other sales method, such as personal selling or point-of-purchase display, to directly move customers to Continue reading
Different Tools of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)
Integrated Marketing Communication is defined as the coordination and integration of all marketing communication tool, avenues and sources within a company into seamless program that maximize the impact on customer and other end users at a minimal cost. This integration affects all firm business-to-business, marketing channel, customer-focused, and internally directed communications. Integrated Marketing Communications is a management concept that is designed to make all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, personal selling and direct marketing work together as a unified force, rather than permitting each to work in isolation. Besides, it acts as an aggressive marketing plan because it sets and tracks marketing strategy that captures and uses extensive amount of customer information. It also ensures that all forms of communications and messages are carefully linked together to achieve specific objective. The important tools of Integrated Marketing Communications are: 1. Advertising Advertising has four characteristics: Continue reading
The Demographic and Technological Environment in Marketing
The Demographic Environment in Marketing Demography is the study of populations in terms of their size and characteristics. Among the topics of interest to demographers are the age structure of a country, the geographic distribution of its population, the balance between males and females, and the likely future size of the population and its characteristics. Changes in the size and age structure of the population are critical to many firms’ marketing. Although the total population of most western countries is stable, their composition is changing. Most countries are experiencing an increase in the proportion of elderly people, and companies who have monitored this trend have responded with the development of residential homes, cruise holidays, and financial portfolio management services aimed at meeting this group’s needs. At the other end of the age spectrum, the birth rate of most countries is cyclical, resulting in a cyclical pattern of demand for age-related Continue reading
Customer Based Brand Equity – Sources, Benefits and Measurement
Brand equity is defined and a comprehensive framework is described that incorporates recent theoretical advances and managerial practices in understanding and influencing consumer behavior. This framework identifies sources and outcomes of brand equity and permits tactical guidelines as to how to build, measure, and manage brand equity, as will be developed further in other sections of the article. Customer-Based Brand Equity Understanding the needs and wants of consumers and customers is at the heart of marketing. A brand equity framework should therefore recognize the importance of the customer in the creation and management of brand equity. Accordingly, customer-based brand equity is defined as the differential effect that brand knowledge has on consumer response to the marketing of that brand. A brand is said to have positive customer-based brand equity when customers react more favorably to a product and the way it is marketed when the brand is identified as compared Continue reading
The Standardized Advertising Approach
There are three basic schools of thought regarding advertising standardization. First one is standardization approach which assumes that due to faster communication there is a convergence of markets and that costumer are becoming increasingly similar. Second is an adaptation approach which point to cultural differences and conclude that advertising must be adapted and the last one compromise approach which recognizes local differences but also that some degree of advertising standardization is possible. Standardized Approach Standardized or global advertising approach is practice of advertising the same brand or same product in the same way everywhere around the world. It looks for similarity across countries and segments to catch up a common thread to capitalize on adverting. That opinion shows that human needs and emotions are the same in everywhere. In addition this communication and transportation, technology, create a global market and desires of costumer around the world become homogenized. Global Continue reading