Geographical pricing refers to the location at which the price is applicable. Geographical pricing strategy is influenced by a number of factors such as the location of the company’s plant, the location of the competitors’ plants and their pricing strategies, dispersion of customers, extent of transport costs, demand and supply conditions and competitive environment. In geographical pricing, there are generally two methods of price basis which are stated in the offers or quotations submitted by a seller to a buyer. These are: Ex-Factory: “Ex-factory” means the prices prevailing at the factory gate. When a seller quotes to a buyer “ex-factory price’, it means that the freight and transit insurance costs are to the buyer’s account. In other words, the seller will charge the costs of freight and insurance to the buyer. The more distant customers landed costs are higher because of freight cost. FOR Destination or FOB Destination: When Continue reading
Marketing Techniques
Personal Selling in Industrial Marketing
Personal selling is one of the oldest forms of promotion. It involves the use of a sales force who orally communicates about the company’s products or services to the potential buyers with an intention to make a sale. Personal selling is the primary demand stimulating force in the industrial marketer’s promotional mix. Its role is very dominant in industrial markets because of less number of potential customers present compared to the consumer markets and the large amount of money purchases involved. As the cost per sale through personal selling is too high, industrial marketers have to carefully manage and integrate personal selling into organization’s marketing mix. This will also lead to maximize its effectiveness and efficiency. The job of personal selling starts after determining the target segment in the organization’s market. The sales force in most of the industrial organizations follow the “systems selling” approach where they recognize the entire Continue reading
Customer Segmentation Analysis
The buying behavior of customers will vary by segment, such as the elderly, the affluent, where people live, and so forth. If you want to understand how to compete, then you should understand the purchasing processes — who is buying what from whom? You can start your analysis with various customer segments and then test each hypothesis to see if this segment is buying the product or service. This type of analysis, referred to as customer segmentation analysis, helps the organization focus on those segments that provide the greatest growth. Customer segmentation analysis identifies and profiles promising target customers so that you can reach them with optimal marketing mixes. All consumer markets contain many subgroups of customers and prospects who behave differently, have different hopes, fears and aspirations, and have different purchasing behaviors. Segmentation enables a company to craft individual marketing plans that hit the “hot buttons” of each consumer Continue reading
Campaign Management Process
The very concept of a campaign in marketing is focused on a time bound effort to design a strategy for various objectives as per the client requirements. The business objectives which can be the drivers for a campaign are considering an effective launch for a range of products, follow-up and may be increase market share sometimes. The process of campaign management involves an understanding of what are the expected benefits of the campaign, budgeting and costing of the campaign while ensuring that all needful resources are met and finally evaluating the effect of the campaign on the target market. There could be various kinds of campaigns and depending on the objectives of the campaign the basic principle can vary while some core processes remain the same. Some campaigns perform more than one of the functions which may include product launch in the first stage and then go on to brand Continue reading
Syndicated Data and Standardized Services in Marketing Research
Today, over $20 billion a year is spent on marketing/advertising/public opinion research services around the world. Spending on marketing research is $6.9 billion in the United States alone. During the past two decades, the research market has become highly concentrated, with about 54 percent of the market being held by the 50 largest worldwide organizations. The other half of the market is shared by a thousand or more small research firms. The concentration is even more pronounced in the United States, where the 10 largest firms account for 64 percent of total U.S. spending for marketing research. In the highly competitive retail market, understanding the customer is paramount. In order to fill in the gaps of consumer’s buying motive and actual buying, companies have to understand the customers, and of course, marketing research is the tool for gaining knowledge about the customers. Marketing research is a systematic gathering of information Continue reading
What is Social Marketing?
Nowadays, social marketing is very common in lots of places, for example government agencies, private nonprofit organizations, private for-profit firms and universities. However, many people don’t know what does social marketing is and how it differs from similar fields such as communications and behavior mobilization, it is being confused with generic marketing like ‘societal marketing’ and ‘socially responsible marketing’. There are some practitioners are doing social advertising but they think they are doing social marketing. Social marketing is to understand how to influence people’s behavior in a good way and make better standard of living for human, so it is necessarily to make all these marketing concept clear and to understand them more deeply. To discuss the concept of social marketing, we first have to know the definition of it. Social marketing is defined as the design, implementation and control of programs calculated to influence the acceptability of social ideas Continue reading