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| Marketing Strategy |
A marketing orientation is a customer focus that is embodied in a company’s mission and strategy. Marketing orientation is essential because it helps a company achieve its mission. The most important thing a company must do is pay attention to its customers to satisfy their needs, wants, and demands. A company should know the difference between stated needs, real needs, unstated needs, delight needs, and secret needs, and should provide many options to satisfy each need.
The five approaches to marketing is production, product, selling, marketing, and societal marketing, and it is common that a company might change from one to another to stay competitive. In order to manage demand, marketers need to know the forms of demand and adapt marketing strategies to them. These include latent demand, increasing demand, irregular demand, full demand, overfull demand, declining demand, unwholesome demand, negative demand, and no demand.
The marketing process begins by identifying the market opportunities that will best help the company achieve its mission. The opportunities are determined by knowing who the target customers are and why they should by “our” product instead of the competitors’. A business will have only two kinds of customers, individual and other businesses or organizations. A company should know the many forces that drive a customer to buy and the steps that lead them to their decision.
Organization customers are different than individual customers because they buy the goods and services from one business that will help their own business. Basically, they are looking for the best possible deal. The three kinds of organizations are for-profit, institutions, and government, and they all have buying patterns which includes the straight rebuy, the modified rebuy, and the new task. Also, organizations differ from individuals when speaking of their purchasing decisions but, the buying process is similar for both of them.
In order to have a continuous customer advantage, a company must sustain a competitive advantage that has meaning for their customers. The company should perform a competitive analysis, beginning with determining who their competitors are. There are both existing and potential competitors, and the most threatening are the potential rivals. Once a company knows who their competitors are, it needs to analyze the rivals’ strategies, objectives, strengths, and weaknesses. Also, a company can tell the level of danger of a competitor by how they respond to changes in the marketplace.
The market strategy of a company will answer why the customers should buy their product instead of the competitors’. The main goals of the strategy is to understand the competitive advantage, how the product fulfills the customer’s needs, and ensures that the product does fulfill the customers’ expectations, needs, and desire. To achieve these goals, a company needs to know the target market’s size and behavior, the benefit of the product, and understand sales, profits, and budget.
It is important for a company to decide what the product is, what the price will be, what place it will be sold in, and what promotions are needed. Differentiation is the act of distinguishing a company’s offering from competitors’ offerings in ways that are meaningful to customers. Positioning is determining and communicating the central benefit of the product in the minds of target buyers. A company must always remember that all products have a life cycle and eventually the product will decline.
Marketing communications is essential because it tells the target market about the availability, benefits, and price of the product. The most effective marketing communication is advertising because it allows the public to view and hear of the product from multiple places at any time of the day. Another type of marketing is a sells person that has to call and persuade a person buy the product.
Guest Post by Paul Centeno
