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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to marketing:
Marketing – social and managerial processes by which products, services, and value are exchanged in order to fulfill individuals' or groups' needs and wants. These processes include, but are not limited to, advertising, promotion, distribution, and product management.
Marketers may sell goods or services directly to consumers, known as business to customer (B2C marketing); commercial organizations (known as business to business marketing or B2B), to government; to not-for-profit organizations (Not-for-profit organization (NFP)) or some combination of any of these.
Marketers typically begin planning with a detailed understanding of customer needs and wants.
Exchange, the act of giving or taking one thing of value in return for another is central to marketing activities. Not all exchange involves Financial transactions, but may also involve barter, contra dealing or other form of trade. The object of exchange can include: Goods; services or experiences; concepts or ideas; causes and may even involve celebrity marketing
Given that marketing has its roots in economics, it shares many foundation concepts with that discipline. Most practicing marketers will have a working knowledge of basic economic concepts and theories.
Businesses seek to compete by achieving competitive advantages or comparative advantages. Competitive advantages often focus on reducing costs through achieving one or more of the following: Economies of scope; Economies of scale; Experience effects; First-mover advantages. Alternatively a business may seek to develop uniqueness through product differentiation or developing unique competencies such as market sensing, rapid market response or delivering superior customer value. superior value.
Different types of competitive markets can be identified: Duopoly; Monopoly; Monopolistic competition; Imperfect competition; Oligopoly
Understanding demand and supply is essential for determining market size and market potential as well as in the price-setting function.
In Western economies, the capitalist economy dominates. However, other types of economic systems such as barter economies and the Sharing economy can be identified.
Value-in-ownership Value-in-use
Marketing planning is just one facet of the overall company's planning. Marketing plans must therefore take their guidance from the overall strategic plan or business plan. Most companies produce both a strategic plan and a managerial plan (also known as an operational plan). The distinction between strategic planning and management planning is that they are two phases with different goals.
Strategic planning requires sophisticated research and analysis to document the firm's current situation as well as to identify opportunities with the potential to be developed.
Strategic research is primarily concerned with the identification of new business opportunities and threats, which derive from the external operating environment. Accordingly, strategic analysts rely less on traditional market research methods. Instead, they use methods such as: Environmental scanning; [1] Marketing intelligence (also known as competitive intelligence) [2] and Futures research [3]
Marketers draw on a very wide variety of techniques and tools when analyzing the market and the broader operating conditions. The technique selected depends on the nature of the situation or problem to be investigated and the analyst's skill and experience. Strategic analysts employ some 200 different quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques including: [4]
Brand Development Index (BDI); Category development index (CDI); [5] Brand/ Category penetration; [6] Benchmarking; [7] Blind spot analysis; [8] Functional capability and resource analysis; [9] Impact analysis; [10] Counterfactual analysis; [11] Demand analysis; [12] Emerging Issues Analysis; [13] Experience curve analysis; [14] Gap analysis; [15] impact analysis; [16] se Analysis (also known as Porter's five forces analysis); [17] Management profiling; Market segmentation analysis; [18] Market share analysis; Market Segmentation analysis; [19] Perceptual mapping; [20] PEST analysis or its variants including PESTLE, STEEPLED and STEER; Portfolio analysis, such as BCG growth-share matrix or GE business screen matrix; [21] Positioning analysis; Precursor Analysis or Evolutionary analysis; [22] Product life cycle analysis and S-curve analysis (also known as technology life cycle or hype cycle analysis); Product evolutionary cycle analysis; [23] Scenario analysis; [24] Segment Share Analysis; Situation analysis; [25] Strategic Group Analysis; [26] SWOT analysis; [27] Trend Analysis; [28] Value chain analysis [29]
Implementations and control is an important feature of the planning process. From time to time, marketers will use appropriate measures of performance to gauge whether plans are achieving the desired results. If necessary, corrective action can be taken to get back on track.
The book titled, The Marketing Book, 7th ed., Routledge, Oxon, UK, 2016 edited by Michael J. Baker and Susan Hart identifies the distinct branches of marketing practice as:
For a more detailed breakdown of the relevant topics for each of these key branches of marketing, see Branches of Marketing: Detailed Topics on this page. For special applications of marketing including marketing of specific types of products (e.g. agricultural marketing, faith based marketing, pharmaceutical marketing, political marketing, sports marketing, etc.,) or marketing to specific target groups (e.g. marketing to children, marketing to older people, LBGT marketing) see: Special applications of marketing practice).
Marketing orientations are the philosophies or mindsets that guide and shape marketing planning and marketing practice. Some marketing historians believe that different philosophies have informed marketing practice at different times in marketing's history. Although there is no real agreement amongst scholars about the precise nature or number of distinct marketing orientations, the most commonly cited include:
Marketing planning or the process of developing a marketing program requires a detailed understanding of the marketing framework including Consumer behavior; Market segmentation and Marketing research. In the process of understanding the consumer market to be served, marketers may need to consider such issues as:
The main steps in the consumer's purchase decision process are: Need or problem recognition → Information search → Evaluation of alternatives → Product/Brand Choice → Post purchase evaluation
Consumers purchase decisions are influenced by a range of internal and external factors including:
Marketing research refers to research activities designed to understand the marketing environment, including competitors, the socio-cultural environment and the politico-legal operating environment. Market research specifically refers to research concerned with understanding the market, that is consumers and is designed to yield actionable customer insights.
Quantitative methods may also be known as Scientific methods.
List of abbreviations for market segments
The main bases for segmenting consumer markets include:
The main bases for segmenting business or industrial markets include:
To support, market segmentation analysis marketers may require access to databases with large sample sizes. A number of commercial companies provide such data which typically includes proprietary software designed to interrogate the data and backed by algorithms that support different types of segmentation approaches. These commercial databases are often country or region specifically. Popular geo-demographic segmentation databases include:
Popular psychometric tools include:
The marketing program, also known as the marketing mix or the 4 ps consists of the product, price, place and promotion.
Innovation and New product development are an important part of a firm's long term growth strategy.
The steps in a basic new production development process are:
The NPD process can be applied to:
A recent trend in NPD is the use of participatory design, also known as co-design or co-operative design, which involves stakeholders such as employees or consumers in the design process.
Sources of new product ideas include: Research and development; Consumers or Users; distributors, suppliers or crowdsourcing.
Types of innovation
NPD represents a high risk activity. It requires substantial investment and a list of product failures suggests that the probability of failure is relatively high.
New product adoption and diffusion
In order to develop a superior understanding of how new products are adopted by the market place and the factors that influence adoption rates, marketers often turn to a number of models or theories of the adoption/diffusion process:
New product development, including the design of product features, manufacturing processes, packaging design etc. involves creative work and therefore constitutes intellectual property. A number of different legal avenues are available to protect different types of intellectual property.
The following methods are prohibited in most nations:
The extended marketing mix is used in the marketing of services, ideas and customer experiences and typically refers to a model of 7 Ps and includes the original 4 Ps plus process, physical evidence and people. Some texts use a model of 8 Ps and include performance level (service quality) as an 8th P.
Marketing activities are costly and represent an investment in a company or brand's long term future. With the increased emphasis on accountability, marketers must consider how they measure marketing's performance and communicate that to stakeholders. Various types of metrics that are in widespread use may be classified as:
Measures of market/ competitive performance
Measures of advertising and promotional effectiveness
Measures of brand health
Customer-oriented measures
Marketing is the act of satisfying and retaining customers. It is one of the primary components of business management and commerce.
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.
Positioning refers to the place that a brand occupies in the minds of the customers and how it is distinguished from the products of the competitors. It is different from the concept of brand awareness. In order to position products or brands, companies may emphasize the distinguishing features of their brand or they may try to create a suitable image through the marketing mix. Once a brand has achieved a strong position, it can become difficult to reposition it. To effectively position a brand and create a lasting brand memory, brands need to be able to connect to consumers in an authentic way, creating a brand persona usually helps build this sort of connection.
A marketing plan is a plan created to accomplish specific marketing objectives, outlining a company's advertising and marketing efforts for a given period, describing the current marketing position of a business, and discussing the target market and marketing mix to be used to achieve marketing goals.
In marketing, market segmentation or customer segmentation is the process of dividing a consumer or business market into meaningful sub-groups of current or potential customers known as segments. Its purpose is to identify profitable and growing segments that a company can target with distinct marketing strategies.
Brand equity, in marketing, is the worth of a brand in and of itself – i.e., the social value of a well-known brand name. The owner of a well-known brand name can generate more revenue simply from brand recognition, as consumers perceive the products of well-known brands as better than those of lesser-known brands.
Marketing management is the strategic organizational discipline that focuses on the practical application of marketing orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and organizations and on the management of marketing resources and activities. Compare marketology, which Aghazadeh defines in terms of "recognizing, generating and disseminating market insight to ensure better market-related decisions".
Competitive analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats. Profiling combines all of the relevant sources of competitor analysis into one framework in the support of efficient and effective strategy formulation, implementation, monitoring and adjustment.
In marketing, brand management begins with an analysis on how a brand is currently perceived in the market, proceeds to planning how the brand should be perceived if it is to achieve its objectives and continues with ensuring that the brand is perceived as planned and secures its objectives. Developing a good relationship with target markets is essential for brand management. Tangible elements of brand management include the product itself; its look, price, and packaging, etc. The intangible elements are the experiences that the target markets share with the brand, and also the relationships they have with the brand. A brand manager would oversee all aspects of the consumer's brand association as well as relationships with members of the supply chain.
Marketing strategy refers to efforts undertaken by an organization to increase its sales and achieve competitive advantage. In other words, it is the method of advertising a company's products to the public through an established plan through the meticulous planning and organization of ideas, data, and information.
In marketing, segmenting, targeting and positioning (STP) is a framework that implements market segmentation. Market segmentation is a process, in which groups of buyers within a market are divided and profiled according to a range of variables, which determine the market characteristics and tendencies. The S-T-P framework implements market segmentation in three steps:
The target audience is the intended audience or readership of a publication, advertisement, or other message catered specifically to the previously intended audience. In marketing and advertising, the target audience is a particular group of consumer within the predetermined target market, identified as the targets or recipients for a particular advertisement or message.
Industrial market segmentation is a scheme for categorizing industrial and business customers to guide strategic and tactical decision-making. Government agencies and industry associations use standardized segmentation schemes for statistical surveys. Most businesses create their own segmentation scheme to meet their particular needs. Industrial market segmentation is important in sales and marketing.
Marketing effectiveness is the measure of how effective a given marketer's go to market strategy is toward meeting the goal of maximizing their spending to achieve positive results in both the short- and long-term. It is also related to marketing ROI and return on marketing investment (ROMI). In today's competitive business environment, effective marketing strategies play a pivotal role in promoting products or services to target audiences. The advent of digital platforms has further intensified competition among businesses, making it imperative for companies to employ innovative and impactful marketing techniques. This essay examines how various types of advertising methods can be utilized effectively to reach out to potential consumers
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.
Global marketing is defined as “marketing on a worldwide scale reconciling or taking global operational differences, similarities and opportunities to reach global objectives".
The study of the history of marketing, as a discipline, is meaningful because it helps to define the baselines upon which change can be recognised and understand how the discipline evolves in response to those changes. The practice of marketing has been known for millennia, but the term "marketing" used to describe commercial activities assisting the buying and selling of products or services came into popular use in the late nineteenth century. The study of the history of marketing as an academic field emerged in the early twentieth century.
A target market, also known as serviceable obtainable market (SOM), 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.
Product planning 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.
Product marketing is a sub-field of marketing that is responsible for crafting the messaging, go-to-market flow, and promotion of a product. Product marketing managers can also be involved in defining and sizing target markets. They collaborate with other stakeholders including business development, sales, and technical functions such as product management and engineering. Other critical responsibilities include positioning and sales enablement.