Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emphasize in advertising; operation of advertising campaigns; attendance at trade shows and public events; design of products and packaging attractive to buyers; defining the terms of sale, such as price, discounts, warranty, and return policy; product placement in media or with people believed to influence the buying habits of others; agreements with retailers, wholesale distributors, or resellers; and attempts to create awareness of, loyalty to, and positive feelings about a brand. Marketing is typically done by the seller, typically a retailer or manufacturer. Sometimes tasks are contracted to a dedicated marketing firm or advertising agency. More rarely, a trade association or government agency advertises on behalf of an entire industry or locality, often a specific type of food, food from a specific area, or a city or region as a tourism destination.
Marketing research is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about issues relating to marketing products and services. The goal is to identify and assess how changing elements of the marketing mix impacts customer behavior.
In marketing, market segmentation is the process of dividing a broad consumer or business market, normally consisting of existing and potential customers, into sub-groups of consumers based on some type of shared characteristics.
Market research is an organized effort to gather information about target markets and customers: know about them, starting with who they are. It is an important component of business strategy and a major factor in maintaining competitiveness. Market research helps to identify and analyze the needs of the market, the market size and the competition. Its techniques encompass both qualitative techniques such as focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnography, as well as quantitative techniques such as customer surveys, and analysis of secondary data.
Management consulting is the practice of selling consulting services to organizations to improve their performance or in any other way assist in achieving any other organizational objectives. Organizations may draw upon the services of management consultants for a number of reasons, including gaining external advice and accessing consultants' specialized expertise.
Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation is the parent of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., an American management and information technology consulting firm, headquartered in McLean, Virginia, in Greater Washington, D.C., with 80 other offices around the globe. The company's stated core business is to provide consulting, analysis and engineering services to public and private sector organizations and nonprofits.
A consulting firm or simply consultancy is a professional service firm that provides expertise and specialised labour for a fee, through the use of consultants. Consulting firms may have one employee or thousands; they may consult in a broad range of domains, for example, management, engineering, and so on.
Psychographics is a qualitative methodology used to describe traits of humans on psychological attributes. Psychographics have been applied to the study of personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. Because this area of research focuses on activities, interests, and opinions, psychographic factors are sometimes abbreviated to 'AIO variables'.
An industry analyst performs primary and secondary market research within an industry such as information technology, consulting or insurance. Analysts assess sector trends, create segment taxonomies, size markets, prepare forecasts, and develop industry models. Industry analysts usually work for research and advisory services firms, and some analysts also perform advisory (consulting) services. Typically, analysts specialize in a single segment or sub-segment, researching the broad development of the market rather than focusing on specific publicly traded companies, equities, investments, or associated financial opportunities as a financial analyst might.
The Curtis Publishing Company, founded in 1891 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, became one of the largest and most influential publishers in the United States during the early 20th century. The company's publications included the Ladies' Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, The American Home, Holiday, Jack & Jill, and Country Gentleman. In the 1940s, Curtis also had a comic book imprint, Novelty Press. The company declined in the later 20th century, and its publications were sold or discontinued. It now exists as Curtis Licensing, which licenses images of and from Curtis magazine covers and artwork.
The Master of Marketing Research (MMR) is a graduate degree program that may be from one to three years in length. Students pursuing this degree study the aspects of research in the field of marketing. Unlike an M.B.A., which is a general business degree, the Master of Marketing Research focuses solely on the aspects of marketing research.
Decision Analyst is an American marketing research and consulting firm based in Arlington, Texas. The firm provides global research and analytical consulting services to major corporations, advertising agencies, and marketing consultancies in the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. It is wholly owned by its employees, and is headquartered in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas.
A market analysis studies the attractiveness and the dynamics of a special market within a special industry. It is part of the industry analysis and thus in turn of the global environmental analysis. Through all of these analyses, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) of a company can be identified. Finally, with the help of a SWOT analysis, adequate business strategies of a company will be defined. The market analysis is also known as a documented investigation of a market that is used to inform a firm's planning activities, particularly around decisions of inventory, purchase, work force expansion/contraction, facility expansion, purchases of capital equipment, promotional activities, and many other aspects of a company.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to marketing:
Technographic segmentation for marketing management is a market research analysis tool used to identify and profile the characteristics and behaviors of consumers through the process of market segmentation. Traditionally market researchers focused on various demographic, psychographic, and lifestyle schemes to categorize and describe homogeneous clusters of consumers that comprise possible target markets.
A target market is a group of customers within a business's serviceable available market at which a business aims its marketing efforts and resources. A target market is a subset of the total market for a product or service.
Strategy& is the strategy consulting business unit of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), one of the Big Four professional service firms. Founded by Edwin G. Booz as Business Research Service in Chicago in 1914, the firm underwent numerous name changes before settling on Booz Allen Hamilton in 1943. In 2008, it split from Booz Allen Hamilton as Booz & Company, and in 2013 it was acquired by PwC, the largest consulting acquisition of the company's history. The contract required PwC to drop the Booz name, and the unit became known as Strategy& in 2014. At the time of acquisition, the company had more than 80 offices in 41 countries.
Product Planning, or product discovery, is the ongoing process of identifying and articulating market requirements that define a product's feature set. It serves as the basis for decision-making about price, distribution and promotion. Product planning is also the means by which companies and businesses can respond to long-term challenges within the business environment, often achieved by managing the product throughout its life cycle using various marketing strategies, including product extensions or improvements, increased distribution, price changes and promotions. It involves understanding the needs and wants of core customer groups so products can target key customer desires and allows a firm to predict how a product will be received within a market upon launch.
Charles Coolidge Parlin was the American "manager of the division of commercial research of the Curtis Publishing Company" in charge of selling advertising spots in the Saturday Evening Post. He is credited as being the founder and a "pioneer" in the area of market research.
Jerry (Yoram) Wind is The Lauder Professor and Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and is the founding director of the Wharton "think tank,” The SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management. He is internationally known for pioneering research on organizational buying behaviour, market segmentation, conjoint analysis, and marketing strategy. He consults with major firms around the world, provides expert testimony in many intellectual property and antitrust cases, and has lectured in over 50 universities worldwide.
