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application of marketing orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and organization
and on the management of a firm's marketing resources and activities.
Globalization has led firms to market beyond the borders of their home countries,
making international marketing highly significant and an integral part of a firm's marketing
strategy.[1] Marketing managers are often responsible for influencing the level, timing, and
composition of customer demand accepted definition of the term. In part, this is because the role
of a marketing manager can vary significantly based on a business's size, corporate culture,
and industry context. For example, in a large consumer products company, the marketing
manager may act as the overall general manager of his or her assigned product.[2] To create an
effective, cost-efficient marketing management strategy, firms must possess a
detailed, objective understanding of their own business and themarket in which they operate.[3] In
analyzing these issues, the discipline of marketing management often overlaps with the related
discipline of strategic planning.
Marketing management employs various tools from economics and competitive strategy to
analyze the industry context in which the firm operates. These include Porter's five forces,
analysis of strategic groups of competitors, value chain analysis and others.[4] Depending on the
industry, the regulatory context may also be important to examine in detail.
In competitor analysis, marketers build detailed profiles of each competitor in the market,
focusing especially on their relative competitive strengths and weaknesses using SWOT analysis.
Marketing managers will examine each competitor's cost structure, sources of profits, resources
and competencies, competitive positioning and product differentiation, degree of vertical
integration, historical responses to industry developments, and other factors.
Marketing management often finds it necessary to invest in research to collect the data required
to perform accurate marketing analysis. As such, they often conduct market
research (alternately marketing research) to obtain this information. Marketers employ a variety
of techniques to conduct market research, but some of the more common include:
Qualitative marketing research, such as focus groups and various types of interviews
The Marketing Metrics Continuum provides a framework for how to categorize metrics from the
tactical to strategic.
If the company has obtained an adequate understanding of the customer base and its own
competitive position in the industry, marketing managers are able to make their own key
strategic decisions and develop a marketing strategy designed to maximize
the revenues and profits of the firm. The selected strategy may aim for any of a variety of
specific objectives, including optimizing short-term unit margins, revenue growth, market share,
long-term profitability, or other goals.
After the firm's strategic objectives have been identified, the target market selected, and the
desired positioning for the company, product or brand has been determined, marketing managers
focus on how to best implement the chosen strategy. Traditionally, this has involved
implementation planning across the "4 Ps" of : product management, pricing (at what price slot
does a producer position a product, e.g. low, medium or high price), place (the place or area
where the products are going to be sold, which could be local, regional, countrywide or
international) (i.e. sales and distribution channels), and Promotion. Now[when?] a new P has been
added making it a total of five P's. The fifth P is politics, which affects marketing in a significant
way.
Taken together, the company's implementation choices across the 4(5) Ps are often described as
the marketing mix, meaning the mix of elements the business will employ to "go to market" and
execute the marketing strategy. The overall goal for the marketing mix is to consistently deliver a
compelling value proposition that reinforces the firm's chosen positioning, builds customer
loyalty and brand equity among target customers, and achieves the firm's marketing and financial
objectives.
In many cases, marketing management will develop a marketing plan to specify how the
company will execute the chosen strategy and achieve the business' objectives. The content of
marketing plans varies from firm to firm, but commonly includes:
An executive summary
Situation analysis to summarize facts and insights gained from market research and
marketing analysis
The company's mission statement or long-term strategic vision
A statement of the company's key objectives, often subdivided into marketing objectives
and financial objectives
The marketing strategy the business has chosen, specifying the target segments to be
pursued and the competitive positioning to be achieved
Implementation choices for each element of the marketing mix (the 4(5)Ps)
Marketing myopia is a term used in marketing as well as the title of an important marketing paper written
by Theodore Levitt.[1] This paper was first published in 1960 in the Harvard Business Review, a journal of which
he was an editor. Marketing Myopia suggeststhat businesses will do better in the end if they concentrate on
meeting customers needs rather than on selling products.
The Myopic culture, Levitt postulated, would pave the way for a business to fail, due to the short-sighted
mindset and illusion that a firm is in a so-called 'growth industry'. This belief leads to complacency and a loss of
sight of what customers want.
To continue growing, companies must ascertain and act on their customers needs and desires, not bank on the
presumptive longevity of their products. In every case the reason growth is threatened, slowed or stopped is
not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.
Some commentators have suggested that its publication marked the beginning of the modern marketing
movement. Its theme is that the vision of most organizations is too constricted by a narrow understanding of
what business they are in. It exhorted CEOs to re-examine their corporate vision; and redefine their markets in
terms of wider perspectives. It was successful in its impact because it was, as with all of Levitt's work,
essentially practical and pragmatic. Organizations found that they had been missing opportunities which were
plain to see once they adopted the wider view. The paper was influential. The oil companies (which
represented one of his main examples in the paper) redefined their business as energy rather than
just petroleum. By contrast, when the Royal Dutch Shell embarked upon an investment program in nuclear
power, it failed to demonstrate a more circumspect regard for their industry.
One reason that short sightedness is so common is that people feel that they cannot accurately predict the
future. While this is a legitimate concern, it is also possible to use a whole range of business prediction
techniques currently available to estimate future circumstances as best as possible.
There is no such a thing as a growth industry. There are only companies organized and operated to create and
capitalize on growth opportunities. There are 4 conditions of self-deceiving cycle:
The belief that growth is assured by an expanding and more affluent population.
The belief that there is no competitive substitute for the industrys major product.
Too much faith in mass production and in the advantages of rapidly declining unit costs as output
rises.
Preoccupation with a product that lends itself to carefully controlled scientific experimentation,
improvement, and manufacturing cost reduction. [2]
Practical usage[edit]
There is a greater scope of opportunities as the industry changes. It trains managers to look beyond their
current business activities and think "outside the box". George Steiner (1979) is one of many in a long line
of admirers who cite Levitt's famous example on transportation. If a buggy whip manufacturer in 1910
defined its business as the "transportation starter business," they might have been able to make the
creative leap necessary to move into the automobile business when technological change demanded it. [3]
People who focus on marketing strategy, various predictive techniques, and the customer's lifetime
value can rise above myopia to a certain extent. This can entail the use of long-term profit objectives
(sometimes at the risk of sacrificing short term objectives).
Similar terms[edit]
However, in case after case, industries have fallen under the shadow of mismanagement. What usually
gets emphasized is selling, not marketing. Rather, the industry is failing because those behind it assumed
they were in the railroad business rather than the transportation business. They were railroad oriented
instead of transportation oriented, product oriented instead of customer oriented. For companies to ensure
continued evolution, they must define their industries broadly to take advantage of growth opportunities.
They must ascertain and act on their customers' needs and desires, not bank on the presumed longevity of
their products. In short, the best way for a firm to be lucky is to make its own luck. An organization must
learn to think of itself not as producing goods or services but as doing the things that will make people
want to do business with it. And in every case, the chief executive is responsible for creating an
environment that reflects this mission. Kotler and Singh (1981) coined the term marketing hyperopia, by
which they mean a better vision of distant issues than of near ones. [5] Baughman (1974) uses the
term marketing macropia meaning an overly broad view of your industry.[6]