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Marketing is a social and managerial function that attempts to create, expand and maintain a collection of customers. It attempts to deliver demand satisfying output through profitable exchanges.
Guerrilla marketing, as described by Jay Conrad Levinson in his popular 1982 book Guerrilla Marketing, is an unconventional way of performing promotional activities on a very low budget. Such promotions are sometimes designed so that the target audience is left unaware they have been marketed to and may therefore be a form of undercover marketing (also called stealth marketing).
It is up to the guerrilla marketer to be creative and devise unconventional methods of promotion. She or he must use all of her or his contacts, both professional and personal, and must examine his company and its products, looking for sources of publicity. Many forms of publicity can be very inexpensive, and others are free.
It is argued that in employing guerilla marketing tactics, small size is an advantage. Small businesses, according to this argument, are able to obtain publicity more easily than large companies; they are closer to their customers and considerably more agile.
Levinson identifies the following principles as the foundation of guerrilla marketing:
Guerrilla Marketing is specifically geared for the small business.
It should be based on human psychology instead of experience, judgment, and guesswork.
Instead of money, the primary investments of marketing should be time, energy, and imagination.
The primary statistic to measure your business is the amount of profits, not sales.
The marketer should also concentrate on how many new relationships are made each month.
Create a standard of excellence with an acute focus instead of trying to diversify by offering allied products and services.
Instead of concentrating on getting new customers, aim for more referrals, more transactions with existing customers, and larger transactions.
Forget about the competition and concentrate more on cooperating with other businesses.
Guerrilla Marketers should always use a combination of marketing methods for a campaign.
Use current technology as a tool to empower your marketing.
While many of these are viable today, Guerrilla Marketing has gone mainstream. It is no longer simply the weapon of the small business and in fact, fortune 500 companies are jumping into the fray in increasing numbers. General Electric, Yahoo, Citigroup, Sony Ericsson and Nike have all done noted guerrilla marketing campaigns.
A Market is a social arrangement that allows buyers and sellers to discover information and carry out a voluntary exchange of goods or services. It is one of the two key institutions that organize trade, along with the right to own property. Allowing markets to arrive at a pareto efficient outcome is one of the key components of capitalism.
In everyday usage, the word "market" may refer to the location where goods are traded, sometimes known as a marketplace, or to a street market.
Conjoint analysis, also called multiattribute compositional models, is a statistical technique that originated in mathematical psychology and was developed by marketing professor Paul Green at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Today it is used in many of the social sciences and applied sciences including marketing, product management, and operations research. The objective of conjoint analysis is to determine what combination of a limited number of attributes is most preferred by respondents. It is used frequently in testing customer acceptance of new product designs and assessing the appeal of advertisements. It has been used in product positioning, but there are some problems with this application of the technique. Recently, new alternatives such as Evolutionary Algorithms (see IDDEA - Interactive Discovery & Design by Evolutionary Algorithms) have been used in market research. Based on those factors strategic company decisions can be made ensuring the full benefit of conjoint analysis.
Market share analysis is an important indicator of how well a firm is doing in the marketplace compared to their competitors. The result of the analysis is very useful to help decide new strategies for an already released software product. Givon, Mahajan, and Muller have researched spreadsheet and word processing software firms to give a clearer image of how to determine market share in the software industry. They propose six factors to help estimate the value of market share (1997):
unit or dollar sales
user base (since piracy and brand switching effect)
market definition(scope of definitions)
scope of denominator(which other brands included)
time frame length
product definition (brand, product line, or strategic business unit)
Determining a software firm’s market share can help determine where it is today and where it wants to be. Also, it helps the firm to relate itself to the offerings of its competitors and to see how successful it has been competing for market share.
Market Segmentation is the process in marketing of dividing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in the same way or have similar needs. Because each segment is fairly homogeneous in their needs and attitudes, they are likely to respond similarly to a given marketing strategy. That is, they are likely to have similar feeling and ideas about a marketing mix comprised of a given product or service, sold at a given price, distributed in a certain way, and promoted in a certain way.
Broadly, markets can be divided according to a number of general criteria, such as by industry or public versus private sector. Small segments are often termed niche markets or specialty markets. However, all segments fall into either consumer or industrial markets. Although it has similar objectives and it overlaps with consumer markets in many ways, the process of Industrial market segmentation is quite different.
The process of segmentation is distinct from targeting (choosing which segments to address) and positioning (designing an appropriate marketing mix for each segment). The overall intent is to identify groups of similar customers and potential customers; to prioritise the groups to address; to understand their behaviour; and to respond with appropriate marketing strategies that satisfy the different preferences of each chosen segment.
Improved segmentation can lead to significantly improved marketing effectiveness. With the right segmentation, the right lists can be purchased, advertising results can be improved and customer satisfaction can be increased.
The Marketing Mix approach to marketing is a model of crafting and implementing marketing strategies. It stresses the "mixing" or blending of various factors in such a way that both organizational and consumer (target markets) objectives are attained. The model was developed by Neil Borden (Borden, N. 1964) who first started using the phrase in 1949. Borden claims the phrase came to him while reading James Culliton's description of the activities of a business executive:
(An executive is) "a mixer of ingredients, who sometimes follows a recipe as he goes along, sometimes adapts a recipe to the ingredients immediately available, and sometimes experiments with or invents ingredients no one else has tried." (Culliton, J. 1948)
When blending the mix elements, marketer(s) must consider their target market. They must understand the wants and needs (see Maslow) of the market (customer) then use these mix elements in constructing (formulating) appropriate marketing strategies and plans that will satisfy these wants. The mix must also meet or exceed the objectives of the organization. As Borden put it,"When building a marketing program to fit the needs of his firm, the marketing manager has to weigh the behavioral forces and then juggle marketing elements in his mix with a keen eye on the resources with which he has to work." (Borden, N. 1964 pg 365). A separate marketing mix is usually crafted for each product offering or for each market segment, depending on the organizational structure of the firm. Borden goes on to suggest a procedure for developing a marketing mix. He claims that you need two sets of information; a list of important elements that go into the mix, and a list of forces that influence these decision variables.
Product Management is an organizational function within a company dealing with the product planning or product marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle.
Product Management is also a collective term used to describe the broad sum of diverse activities performed in the interest of delivering a particular product to market.
From a practical perspective, product management is an occupational domain which hold two professional disciplines: product planning and product marketing. This is because the product's functionality is created for the user via product planning efforts, and product value is presented to the buyer via product marketing activities.
Product planning and product marketing are very different but due to the collaborative nature of these two disciplines, some companies erroneously perceive them as being one discipline, which they call product management. Done carefully, it is very possible to functionally divide the product management domain into product planning and product marketing, yet retain the required synergy between the two disciplines.
Product planning typically deals with these activities:
Defining new products and gathering market requirements
Distribution is one of the four aspects of marketing. A distributor is the middleman between the manufacturer and retailer. After a product is manufactured it is typically shipped (and typically sold) to a distributor. The distributor then sells the product to retailers or customers.
The concept of price is central to microeconomics where it is one of the most important variables in resource allocation theory (also called price theory).
Price is also central to marketing where it is one of the four variables in the marketing mix that business people use to develop a marketing plan.
Star-Kist uses a variety of promotional methods to sell tuna.
Get a peek at some of them at the company’s consumer
Web site
Check
out the following advertising-related links: http://www.ica-ad.com/
http://www.weddles.com/, http://www.ad-freaks.com/,
http://www.iabcanada.com/
How
can you find the right magazine in which to advertise?
The MediaFinder
Web site has a searchable database of thousands of magazines.
Jane Summers — University of Southern Queensland
Michael Gardiner — University of Southern Queensland
Charles Lamb — Texas Christian University
Joseph Hair — Louisiana State University
Carl McDaniel — University of Texas
Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop.
It
offers important new thinking and expanded coverage
on:
Connecting
with customers: connecting more selectively, more
directly, and for life.
Relationship
marketing - finding, keeping, and growing profitable
customers and capturing customer lifetime value by
building value-laden customer relationships.
Check the availability and buy your books from our Bookshop.
Norm
Althouse, University of Calgary
Shirley Rose, Mount Royal College
Laura Allan, Wilfred Laurier University
Lawrence J. Gitman, San Diego State University
Carl McDaniel, University of Texas
