Entrepreneurial Marketing

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Rationale

Learning Objectives and Outcomes

Teaching and Learning Resources

Strategy Mentor Module
Financing Mentor Module
Branding Mentor Module
Viral Marketing Mentor Module
CRM Mentor Module
Distribution Mentor Module
New Product Mentor Module
Public Relations Mentor Module

Chat Lines, Discussion Forums, Wikis

Related Workshops

Case Studies

Learner Support

Recommended Text

Resources

Assignments, Assessments

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Learning Centres

Entrepreneurial Marketing

Rationale

Marketing Management is a business discipline focused on the practical application of marketing techniques and the management of a firm's marketing resources and activities. Marketing managers are often responsible for influencing the level, timing, and composition of customer demand in a manner that will achieve the company's objectives.

Learning Objectives and Outcomes

This is a non-taught unit designed for self-directed study by those planning to start their own business.

Knowledge

After completing this module, entrepreneurs will be able to:

1. Understand the principles of market and marketing research and how to apply their outcomes to the business, financial and marketing strategy planning

2. Critical review the concepts of business and strategy planning, and their implementation

3. Understand the role of marketing in raising finances for a new venture

4. Understand the elements of the Marketing Mix and successfully apply them to their own business

5. Understand the concept of competitive advantage and why different products and services require different levels of management and investment

6. Analyse the distribution and logistics options and make informed decisions

7. Understand communications objectives and appropriate promotional channels to deliver persuasive messages to the target audience

8. Understand why pricing decisions are critically important to the business

Skills

After completing this module, students will be able to:

1. Conduct actionable marketing research – to help secure competitive advantage

2. Construct a strategic audit for the business

3. Develop appropriate marketing communications for target markets

4. Price the products and services effectively

5. Make appropriate distribution and logistics decisions

6. Align all marketing and sales activities to achieve maximum growth

7. Construct and implement a realistic marketing strategy

8. Write and present an actionable Business Plan to the stakeholders of the new business

Today's Videos

Teaching and Learning Resources

Click on titles

Learning Contents

Strategy

Tutorials

Introduction
Entrepreneurial Marketing
Competitive Advantage - The First Mover Advantage
Marketing Research
Focus vs Diversification
Formulating Killer Strategies for Your Business Christos (zip)

M. Cotsakos, Ph.D., Former Chairman and CEO, E*TRADE Financial

Cases

Readings

Competitive advantage is defined as the strategic advantage one business entity has over its rival entities within its competitive industry. Achieving competitive advantage strengthens and positions a business better within the business environment.

See also

External links

Marketing strategy is a process that can allow an organization to concentrate its limited resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.^[1]

See also

External links

Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy. In order to determine the direction of the organization, it is necessary to understand its current position and the possible avenues through which it can pursue a particular course of action. Generally, strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions^[1]:

"What do we do?"
"For whom do we do it?"
"How do we excel?"

In many organizations, this is viewed as a process for determining where an organization is going over the next year or—more typically—3 to 5 years (long term), although some extend their vision to 20 years.

See also

Military Strategy and The Art of War for the origins
Business Strategy Mapping
Decision making software
Enterprise planning systems
Hoshin Kanri
Integrated Business Planning
Strategic planning software

Financing

Tutorials

Business Planning
Marketing's Role in Raising Finances for Your New Venture (zip)

Guy Kawasaki, Founder and CEO, Garage Technology Ventures, Inc.

Readings

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, taxpayer, or larger community. When the existing business is to assume a major change or when planning a new venture, a 3 to 5 year business plan is required, since investors will look for their annual return in that timeframe.^[1]

See also

References

Is There a Market In The Gap? How To Assess The Financial Prospects Of Your New Business Idea

Venture capital (VC) is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which and usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as biotechnology, IT, software, etc. The typical venture capital investment occurs after the seed funding round as growth funding round (also referred to as Series A round) in the interest of generating a return through an eventual realization event, such as an IPO or trade sale of the company. Venture capital is a subset of private equity. Therefore, all venture capital is private equity, but not all private equity is venture capital.^[1]

In addition to angel investing and other seed funding options, venture capital is attractive for new companies with limited operating history that are too small to raise capital in the public markets and have not reached the point where they are able to secure a bank loan or complete a debt offering. In exchange for the high risk that venture capitalists assume by investing in smaller and less mature companies, venture capitalists usually get significant control over company decisions, in addition to a significant portion of the company's ownership (and consequently value).

Venture capital is also associated with job creation (accounting for 2% of US GDP),^[2] the knowledge economy, and used as a proxy measure of innovation within an economic sector or geography. Every year, there are nearly 2 million businesses created in the USA, and only 600–800 get venture capital funding. According to the National Venture Capital Association, 11% of private sector jobs come from venture backed companies and venture backed revenue accounts for 21% of US GDP.^[3]

It is also a way in which public and private actors can construct an institution that systematically creates networks for the new firms and industries, so that they can progress. This institution helps in identifying and combining pieces of companies, like finance, technical expertise, know-hows of marketing and business models. Once integrated, these enterprises succeed by becoming nodes in the search networks for designing and building products in their domain.^[4]

See also

Venture capital financing
Corporate Venture Capital
History of private equity and venture capital
List of venture capital firms
Adventure capital
Angel investor
Crowd funding
Enterprise Capital Fund a type of Venture Capital fund in the UK
IPO
M&A
National Venture Capital Association
Private equity
Private equity secondary market
Seed funding
Sweat equity
Social Venture Capital
Notes
References

External links

Branding

Tutorials

Branding That Works

Leonard Armato, Founder, Management Plus Enterprises and Commissioner, AVP Pro Beach Volleyball Tour

Readings

The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers." ^[1]

A brand can take many forms, including a name, sign, symbol, colour combination or slogan. For example, Coca Cola is the name of a brand make by a particular company. ^[2]The word branding began simply as a way to tell one person's cattle from another by means of a hot iron stamp. The word brand has continued to evolve to encompass identity—it affects the personality of a product, company or service. It is defined by a perception, good or bad, that your customers or prospects have about you. ^[3]

In the automotive industry, the terms marque^[4] or make^[5] are often used to denote a brand of motor vehicle.

A concept brand is a brand that is associated with an abstract concept, like breast cancer awareness or environmentalism, rather than a specific product, service, or business. A commodity brand is a brand associated with a commodity. Got milk? is an example of a commodity brand.

See also

External links

New Tool in Trademark Fights

Marketing

Tutorials

OBE, Non-Executive Director and Founder, The Body Shop

Readings

In economics, market structure (also known as the number of firms producing identical products).

1. Monopolistic competition, also called competitive market, where there are a large number of firms, each having a small proportion of the market share and slightly differentiated products.

3. Oligopoly, in which a market is dominated by a small number of firms that together control the majority of the market share.

4. Duopoly, a special case of an oligopoly with two firms.

5. Oligopsony, a market where many sellers can be present but meet only a few buyers.

6. Monopoly, where there is only one provider of a product or service.

7. Natural monopoly, a monopoly in which economies of scale cause efficiency to increase continuously with the size of the firm. A firm is a natural monopoly if it is able to serve the entire market demand at a lower cost than any combination of two or more smaller, more specialized firms.

8. Monopsony, when there is only one buyer in a market.

9. Perfect competition is a theoretical market structure that features unlimited contestability (or no barriers to entry), an unlimited number of producers and consumers, and a perfectly elastic demand curve.

The imperfectly competitive structure is quite identical to the realistic market conditions where some monopolistic competitors, monopolists, oligopolists, and duopolists exist and dominate the market conditions. The elements of Market Structure include the number and size distribution of firms, entry conditions, and the extent of differentiation.

These somewhat abstract concerns tend to determine some but not all details of a specific concrete market system where buyers and sellers actually meet and commit to trade. Competition is useful because it reveals actual customer demand and induces the seller (operator) to provide service quality levels and price levels that buyers (customers) want, typically subject to the seller’s financial need to cover its costs. In other words, competition can align the seller’s interests with the buyer’s interests and can cause the seller to reveal his true costs and other private information. In the absence of perfect competition, three basic approaches can be adopted to deal with problems related to the control of market power and an asymmetry between the government and the operator with respect to objectives and information: (a) subjecting the operator to competitive pressures, (b) gathering information on the operator and the market, and (c) applying incentive regulation.^[1]

External links

Microeconomics by Elmer G. Wiens: Online Interactive Models of Oligopoly, Differentiated Oligopoly, and Monopolistic Competition

A marketing strategy is based on expected customer behaviour in a certain market. In order to know the customer and its expected buying process of segmenting and positioning is needed. These processes are chronological steps which are dependent on each other. The process of market segmentation and of positioning are described elsewhere within the Wikipedia. This topic elaborates on the dependency and relationship between these processes.

The process-data model, see below
Segmenting
Targeting
Positioning
B2C and B2B

See also

Programme Evaluation Matrix

External links

The Best Country to Start a Business...

...and other facts you probably didn't know about entrepreneurship around the world

Mentor insights
Internet Resources
www.themanager.org [1]
B2B Marketing Org[2] - How to develop a positioning statement

CRM

Tutorials

Creating a Company Culture that Fosters Effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Paul Orfalea, Founder, Kinko's, Inc.

Readings

Organisational culture is defined as “A pattern of shared basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration" that have worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems” Schein.^[1] It has also been defined as "the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization."^[2] Ravasi and Schultz (2006) state that organisational culture is a set of shared mental assumptions that guide interpretation and action in organizations by defining appropriate behaviour for various situations.

External links

Organisational Culture and Institutional Transformation - From the Education Resources Information Centre Clearinghouse on Higher Education Washington, DC.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a broad term that covers concepts used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, including the capture, storage and analysis of customer information.

See also

References
- http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/3520/53/
- http://www.ifslearning.com/events/financial_innovation_awards/fia_winners_2006.cfm

External Links

Distribution

Tutorials

Devising Distribution-Dominating Tactics Ken Park, Founder and President, BBM. HyperCD

Readings

Product distribution (or place) is one of the four elements of the marketing mix. An organization or set of organizations (go-between) involved in the process of making a product or service available for use or consumption by a consumer or business user.

Managerial concerns

See also

The other three parts of the marketing mix are product, pricing, and promotion.
Agricultural marketing

All commodity volume

Cargo

Channel Value Proposition

Document automation in supply chain management and logistics

Extended Enterprise

Good distribution practice (GDP)

Haulage

Liquid logistics

Logistics

Marketing

External Links

New Product

Tutorials

Savvy Strategies for Marketing New Products

Dirk Gates, Founder, Xircom-An Intel Company

Readings

In business and engineering, new product development (NPD) is the term used to describe the complete process of bringing a new product to market. A product is a set of benefits offered for exchange and can be tangible (that is, something physical you can touch) or intangible (like a service, experience, or belief). There are two parallel paths involved in the NPD process: one involves the idea generation, product design and detail engineering; the other involves market research and marketing analysis. Companies typically see new product development as the first stage in generating and commercializing new products within the overall strategic process of product life cycle management used to maintain or grow their market share.

See also

Public Relations

Tutorials

The Art of Crafting Budget-Boosting Public Relations

Nicolas G. Hayek, Chairman of the Board, The Swatch Group, Ltd.

Readings

Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics.^[1] Public relations provides an organization or individual exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment.^[2] Their aim is often to persuade the public, investors, partners, employees and other stakeholders to maintain a certain point of view about the company, its leadership, products or of political decisions. Common activities include speaking at conferences, winning industry awards, working with the press, and employee communication.^[3]