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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Marketing is shrouded in arcane mystery and buzzwords. It frightens many and bewilders others. Yet every business, from the hand-car-wash by the side of the road, to the world's most famous brands, engage in marketing every single day. This is an essential, reliable, speedy and up to date guide to the most robust and important concepts in marketing.
This book shows you how to understand and do marketing without having to study a degree or a diploma in it. Along the way it shows you what has been learned about marketing over the centuries, what experts can teach us that we can use ourselves, how marketing has changed in our new ‘digital' world, and how to avoid classic mistakes.
In short, this is all you need to know about marketing.
Introduction - Marketing: the world's second oldest business activity
Chapter 1 - The Product.
Chapter 2 - The Marketing Strategy and the Marketing Plan
Chapter 3 - Your Customers.
Chapter 4 - Pricing and Promotion
Chapter 5 - Placement or Distribution.
Chapter 6 - Customer Engagement
Chapter 7 - Branding
Chapter 8 - Social Media and Digital Marketing
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Seitenzahl: 248
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Table of Contents
Cover
What You Need to Know
Title page
Copyright page
INTRODUCTION
LET’S GET STARTED
MARKETING VERSUS SALES
NEEDS VERSUS WANTS
CHAPTER 1 THE CUSTOMERS
NEEDS, WANTS AND DEMANDS
VALUE PROPOSITIONS
MARKETING OFFERS
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CUSTOMERS AND CONSUMERS
CUSTOMERS AND PROFIT
CUSTOMER VALUE AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
CREATING PROFITABLE RELATIONSHIPS
THE MARKET AND THE INDUSTRY
CHAPTER 2 THE PRODUCT
THE PRODUCT–SERVICE SPECTRUM
EXPERIENCES
THREE LEVELS OF A PRODUCT
CLASSIFYING ‘CONSUMER’ PRODUCTS
DEGREES OF CONSUMER INVOLVEMENT
CONVENIENCE PRODUCTS
SHOPPING PRODUCTS
SPECIALITY PRODUCTS
WE’RE ALL IN THE SERVICE BUSINESS
BUSINESS PRODUCTS
THE LIFE-CYCLE OF PRODUCTS
NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
THE NEW PRODUCT IMPERATIVE
NOT EVERY NEW PRODUCT IS REALLY NEW
MANAGING THE PRODUCT PORTFOLIO
SUPPLY AND DEMAND OF PRODUCTS
FROM SUPPLY-LED TO DEMAND-DRIVEN
CHAPTER 3 THE MARKET
ENVIRONMENTAL SCANNING
LOOKING AT THE COMPETITION
THE THREAT FROM COMPETITORS
MARKET SEGMENTATION
SEGMENTATION APPROACHES
FROM SEGMENTATION TO TARGETING
TAKING A POSITION IN THE MARKET
SIX STEPS FROM SEGMENTATION TO MARKETING STRATEGY
TARGET SEGMENTS ARE MADE OF REAL PEOPLE
LOW, MEDIUM AND HIGH INVOLVEMENT
INFORMATION SEARCH
THE AWARENESS SET AND EVALUATION
THE PURCHASING DECISION AND POST-PURCHASE EVALUATION
CHAPTER 4 BRANDING
BRAND IN THE BOARDROOM
BRAND AS A SET OF MEANINGS
STRONG DOESN’T NECESSARILY MEAN POSITIVE
MEANING CHANGES WITH BEHAVIOUR NOT JUST COMMUNICATIONS
BRAND AS VALUE
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF SUCCESSFUL BRANDS
AN ANCHOR IN THE MIND
LOVEMARKS, THE FUTURE BEYOND BRANDING
FROM BRAND TO BRAND POSITIONING
BRAND ARCHITECTURE
BRAND IDENTITY
BRAND EXTENSION AND SUB-BRANDS
CHAPTER 5 COMMUNICATING
THE SECOND ‘P’
THE MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS MIX
MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MARKET AND THE AUDIENCE
PUSHING AND PULLING IN THE MARKET
OBSTACLES IN THE MARCOMMS PROCESS
FROM GAINING ATTENTION TO PROMPTING ACTION
ADVERTISING: NOT DEAD YET
FOUR ELEMENTS TO GET RIGHT
DIRECT RESPONSE ADVERTISING
HITTING THE TARGET WITH DIRECT MARKETING
PUBLIC RELATIONS: FROM GOODWILL TO PROMOTIONAL TOOL
MEDIA RELATIONS
THE RISE AND RISE OF SPONSORSHIP
SALES PROMOTION
THE SURPRISING SURVIVAL OF THE SALES REPRESENTATIVE
CHAPTER 6 PRICE AND PLACE
GETTING IN FRONT OF THE CUSTOMER
THE MARKETER’S VIEW OF PLACE
THE SUPPLY CHAIN AND THE CHANNEL OF DISTRIBUTION
MANUFACTURERS
RETAILERS AND RESELLERS
WHOLESALERS
AGENTS
LOGISTICS COMPANIES
THE POWER RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PLAYERS
CHOOSING THE MARKET ‘PLACE’
TIME AND CONVENIENCE
THE INTERNET IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN
PRICING: NOT JUST A MATTER OF MONEY
CUSTOMER VALUE PRICING
REVENUE AND PROFIT
PRICING STRATEGIES
MARKET-FOCUSED PRICING
COST-BASED PRICING
MORE PRICE COMPLEXITY
PRICING TACTICS
ELASTICITY OF DEMAND
FEAR OF THE ROUND POUND
CHAPTER 7 STRATEGY, PLANNING AND TACTICS
CHOOSING A STRATEGIC ORIENTATION
PRODUCTION ORIENTATION
PRODUCT ORIENTATION
SALES ORIENTATION
MARKETING ORIENTATION
CONFLICTS PROMPTED BY THE MARKETING ORIENTATION
MARKETING STRATEGY TO MARKETING PLAN
CREATING THE MARKETING PLAN
ANALYSIS OF CURRENT SITUATION
SETTING STRATEGIC MARKETING OBJECTIVES
DESCRIBING THE MARKETING PLAN
IMPLEMENTATION
MONITORING AND EVALUATION
CHAPTER 8 THE THIRD AGE OF MARKETING
FROM MASS MARKETING TO POSITIONING, TO LOVE!
THE DAWN OF MARKETING 3.0
THE ARRIVAL OF THE GLOBAL CONVERSATION
THREE DEMANDS OF THE NEWLY CONNECTED CONSUMERS
THE REBIRTH OF MISSION STATEMENTS
POSITIVE ENGAGEMENT IN THE ONLINE CONVERSATION
SEARCH AS THE MOST EFFECTIVE FORM OF RESEARCH
NOT SEARCH TACTICS BUT SEARCH STRATEGY
THE SEARCH CONVERSATION MINDSET
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Index
This is the stuff you’ve always been embarrassed to ask about the world of modern business.
The What You Need to Know … books can get you up to speed on a core business subject fast. Whether it’s for a new job, a new responsibility, or a meeting with someone you need to impress, these books will give you what you need to get by as someone who knows what they’re talking about.
Each book contains:
What It’s all About –
a summary of key points
Who You Need to Know –
the basics about the key players
Who Said It –
quotes from key figures
What You Need to Read –
books and online resources for if you want to deepen your knowledge
If You Only Remember One Thing –
a one-liner of the most important information
You might also want to know:
What You Need to Know about Business
What You Need to Know about Economics
What You Need to Know about Project Management
What You Need to Know about Strategy
What You Need to Know about Leadership
What You Need to Know about Starting a Business
This edition first published 2011
© 2011 Simon Middleton
Registered office
Capstone Publishing Ltd. (A Wiley Company), The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom
For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com.
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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
9780857081506 (paperback), 9780857081704 (epub),
9780857081711 (emobi), ISBN 9781119974881 (ebk)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
INTRODUCTION
I have a good friend who hates marketing. She thinks it’s of dubious morality and questionable effectiveness. Actually, she thinks marketing is ‘rubbish’. Well that’s not the word she uses, but you get the idea.
It’s hardly surprising she feels this way. And she’s not alone. Marketing has a bad reputation. Worse still it has a hugely confused and confusing one. It is often considered to be synonymous with ‘spin’ or ‘manipulation’ (bad things and the work of evil geniuses in the view of its opponents). Equally it is often dismissed as stuff and nonsense (and therefore condemned as the work of fools who aren’t capable of doing proper jobs).
Evil genius or pointless nonsense? They can’t both be true. Can they?
In fact marketing is probably one of the earliest activities ever undertaken by mankind, after hunting, making fire and building shelter. Because marketing, when you get right down to it, is based on the simple idea of exchange between people.
I have some fresh meat because I spent my day hunting. You have sharper tools than me because you spent your day flint-knapping. If I give you a leg of my deer, will you give me one of your stone knives so I can skin the beast? Fair exchange is no robbery, as we may well have grunted to each other back then. That’s exchange, the swapping of something of value for something of roughly (estimated, negotiated and agreed) equal value.
That’s not marketing in its totality of course, but it is the heart of the matter. One cave dweller approaching another with the ‘deer-leg for flint knife’ proposition is marketing, albeit of a primitive sort. The initiator with the fresh deer in this case is the marketer, and the flint-knapper is the customer. Although it could have been the other way round. Take this thought experiment a little further. Our deer hunter discovers a real talent for catching deer and offers to specialise in this, ‘trading’ the resulting abundance of fresh meat with others in the clan, in exchange for gathered fruit, or arrows, or some paint for the cave walls! Suddenly we’ve got a small business. A business which has relationships with customers. And the word that most accurately describes those relationships is: marketing.
Because fundamentally marketing is about relationships. And if we flash forward a few millennia to the present day, when marketing is more sophisticated than it has ever been before, we discover that marketing is still about relationships, and that marketing still lies at the very centre of this human activity that we call business.
Of course if we didn’t need or want to exchange (to do business with each other) then we wouldn’t need to do marketing. And you wouldn’t need to read this book. But the reverse is also true. If we don’t do marketing, then we can’t do business. Or to put it more bluntly: if we don’t understand marketing and do it well, then our businesses (or our charity, or even our public sector organisation) will under-perform, perhaps to the point of going under. And the sad truth is that many businesses don’t do marketing well, at all.
We live and work and trade in challenging times. Too many businesses are focused on every aspect of what they do (from technology to cost cutting) apart from the one which could make such a huge difference to their fortunes: their marketing.
This book isn’t a history of marketing, or a philosophical exploration of marketing. Neither is it a detailed action plan which will solve all your marketing problems for you. This book tells you what you really need to know about marketing: and it assumes, to be on the safe side, that you may not have known very much about marketing before you picked it up. If you only ever read one book about the subject, then if it’s this one you’ll have the essential concepts to help you to understand and ultimately to ‘do’ marketing better (or at least to contribute to its being done by someone else in your company or organisation).
A final point before we begin: although I refer repeatedly in this book to companies and businesses, don’t let this put you off if you work in a charity or a public sector organisation. The essential truths and concepts of marketing are equally applicable in the private, public and voluntary sectors, just as they are to organisations ranging in size from one person and his dog through to global super companies.
LET’S GET STARTED
The absolute, number one, most important, and sacrosanct principle of marketing is that it’s about customers. CUSTOMERS! That really can’t be stressed enough, because so many people think that marketing is either synonymous with sales, or is primarily concerned with advertising or other promotional activity. But it isn’t: it’s about customers, and to be even more specific it’s about relationships with customers. To go back briefly to our cave dwellers: it’s the relationship between them (which leads to the agreement between them) that is the really important part of the deal, rather than the deer leg or the stone tool in themselves. The point behind this is that marketing is not actually about selling as such but about fulfilling and satisfying the needs of your customer.
MARKETING VERSUS SALES
We need to clarify this marketing v. sales issue. Marketing and sales are not the same thing. But they still get confused. There are still quite substantial companies which have a senior person called ‘Sales & Marketing Director’, although it’s less prevalent than even a decade ago. And why is it so important to stress that marketing and sales are fundamentally different from each other? Because marketing begins with what customers need and want, and sales begins with what the company needs to sell (because, for whatever reason, it’s made a particular product and has lots of it, or it has designed a particular service and now needs to get that service picked up by customers). See the difference?
A restaurateur who owns three popular establishments told me once to always avoid choosing from the ‘specials’ board in unfamiliar restaurants. Why? Because, in the view of this particular insider at least, the specials board is about shifting whatever the restaurant has got slightly too much of in the larder. Lobster on the specials board? They’ve got a couple that didn’t get ordered by customers yesterday and they absolutely have to use them today. The specials board therefore isn’t marketing, because it’s not about us, the customer. It is instead selling, because it’s about them, the restaurant.
NEEDS VERSUS WANTS
To look at this another way, successful companies increasingly seem to be those who understand what real people actually need and want (we’ll explore the difference between needs and wants presently) and then do something to fulfil that need or want. Less successful (and failing companies) have a tendency to be those who produced or provided whatever they wanted to produce or provide (or whatever they had always produced or provided) rather then paying heed to what customers might want to buy. There’s a caveat to this statement of course (and it won’t be the last caveat in this book) which is that paying heed to customer needs and wants IS NOT THE SAME as assuming that the customers always know in advance what they need and want.
Before the iPod we didn’t know we wanted one did we? Go back further. Before the Sony Walkman (if you’re old enough to remember the excitement of this device arriving in 1981 like a vision of the future in those dark days), we didn’t really know that we needed or wanted a cassette recorder that we could clip to our belts and listen to with headphones. Still less a cassette recorder that didn’t actually record but only played back. And of course the Walkman, and subsequently the iPod, were not only huge commercial successes, but also cultural and market game-changers.
So don’t fall into the trap of thinking that customers know everything, especially in advance of the fact. They don’t. But that doesn’t make Sony or Apple reckless anti-marketers. Far from it. Sony geeks took their proto-device (which was not backed initially by the corporation) onto the Tokyo underground system and used it. It wasn’t long before they had gathered strong evidence that there was a ‘market’ for the device. The rest is history. And it is a history which directly informed Apple in their development of the iPod. The ‘market’ for the mobile music device was already proven. Apple took it into the digital era.
If you think about it, Apple has never really had to ‘sell’ us the iPod, or any of its other devices (at least not since its reinvention as a marketing-oriented company, with the launch of the iMac in the early 1990s). Apple certainly does advertising, and high-profile advertising too, and it spends huge sums on communications of many different kinds. But it doesn’t have to persuade us to buy. Instead it creates a scenario in which enough of us are passionately keen to do so. See the difference?
So, marketing is much misunderstood and sometimes maligned. Yet its role in the modern economy, and in the survival and prosperity of virtually any business, large or small, is indisputable. Some claim marketing is a science. Others would call it an art. It is perhaps more appropriate to describe it as a mindset, or an outlook.
The intention of this book is to show that this marketing mindset is not only critical to business success, but also exciting in itself, both to understand and to engage in.
To enjoy and find value in this book you don’t need to have any prior marketing knowledge at all. It will take you through all the key concepts in marketing, from its origins as a discipline through to the very latest ‘digital’ thinking.
The book covers the fundamental building blocks of marketing: looking at the ‘big ideas’ about customers and markets, products and services, pricing, promotion and distribution. Along the way you’ll meet most of the great marketing thinkers, including some names who will be very familiar (but whom you may not have thought of as marketers).
Each chapter also provides key pointers for further reading, both offline and online, to take exploration of particular concepts further if you wish.
This book isn’t intended to turn anyone into a marketer overnight: but it will enable you to understand your marketing specialist colleagues (not to mention helping you to cut through the jargon), and will put you in a very strong position to make a persuasive case for a marketing mindset in your company or organisation.
CHAPTER 1
THE CUSTOMERS
Arguably the most important fundamental concepts in marketing are those of needs and wants: the prime motivators for the human behaviour which turns us into ‘customers’. Without needs and wants there would be no motivation for us to buy. The marketer’s first task therefore is to consider what it is that people actually need and want, even if those people don’t yet know the answer themselves.
NEEDS, WANTS AND DEMANDS
A self-assured female character in a well-known Bob Dylan song points out to her hesitant lover that whilst his debutante girlfriend might well know what he ‘needs’, it is she that knows what he actually ‘wants’. We know exactly what is being implied here and it points up an important concept in marketing: the difference between needs, wants and demands.
Our needs can be described as things that are fundamental to us as humans. Fundamental, but not necessarily physical. We need air, water, food. We need to be out of the cold, and out of the scorching sun. We need protection from danger. But we need more than those physical and environmental basics. We need to be part of social groups. We need a sense of ‘security’ which goes beyond immediate safety. And we seem, as humans, to have a need to understand what is going on in our world. From primitive reassurance that the sun will rise tomorrow, through to more sophisticated understanding about ‘why’ (embracing science, religion, philosophy).
The famous hierarchy of needs described by Abraham Maslow is still hard to beat as a summary of our multi-layered human needs. Maslow’s model is useful and descriptive, but some contemporary thinkers point out that it is also limited in outlook, in that it is hierarchical. Maslow argued in this model that we only feel, express, and seek to satisfy our ‘higher needs’ once we have fulfilled the more basic ones. His critics say this is wrong: and that even those people for whom the finding of food, shelter and safety are daily challenges nevertheless have higher needs at the same time. Interestingly, it is remarked by some commentators that Maslow said before his death that he regretted the hierarchical nature of his model and acknowledged that humans strive for higher meanings and for ‘self-actualisation’ even when they are otherwise at the bottom of his notional pyramid, where they are also struggling daily for the bare essentials to stay alive. Notwithstanding that revision of the concept, it remains a useful model for considering the kinds of needs that humans have.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
The real significance of needs though is that they are unavoidable. As the cliché goes, there will always be a market for undertakers. Meeting needs is the basis of so much of our economic activity of course. From building houses to baking bread, from growing potatoes to making shoes.
But meeting needs is far from the only way to go to market. Because we don’t just need: we also want!
If our needs are unavoidable, then at least they are relatively limited. Maslow encapsulated them fairly simply. Our wants on the other hand are discretionary (in other words we can live without them), but they are also virtually unlimited and unpredictable in scope. They are also of course very often deeply irrational.
If you listen to teenagers talking in a shopping mall you’ll hear the ‘need’ word used in an interesting way. One teenage girl shopper will point at a shop window display and say excitedly to her friends: ‘Oh my God, I soooo need that top.’
She doesn’t need that particular top of course. At least not in a way that could be described in purely rational (or in Maslow’s) terms. No, she doesn’t need to buy it, but she certainly wants to do so. ‘Wants’ may not be as old as needs in the scheme of things, but they aren’t far behind, and they have long been rich territory for marketers and arguably the key driver of what we refer to as ‘the consumer society’.
Because we have needs and wants we also have the environment in which exchange, business and thus marketing can take place. And the marketer in any given company or organisation should be primarily engaged in understanding those needs and wants and steering their company towards the satisfaction of them.
But there is a third dimension which has to be considered, the pinnacle of the needs/wants model: demands. Demands are simply wants which are backed by sufficient buying power to make them unavoidable by the marketer.
There was a time when we did most of our banking by visiting a branch on our high street or in our village or neighbourhood. First Direct pioneered the use of phone banking in the UK, more than 20 years ago. First Direct appealed then to the ‘wants’ of a relatively small number of customers interested in a new approach to banking, unrestricted by the need to be physically present or by the opening times of high street banks. Not many years later, having been copied in their phone banking offering by most other banks (although less effectively by most), First Direct was one of a new set of banking pioneers focusing on using the internet as the prime interface between bank and customer.
Now of course that early ‘want’ of a few people (usually referred to as early-adopters) for phone and internet banking has become a ‘demand’ of many. Very few banking customers in the developed economies would consider choosing a new bank which didn’t provide 24-hour phone and internet banking. There are exceptions to this (there are always exceptions in marketing), such as certain private banks, or customers (mainly older) for whom the phone and internet services are much less relevant and appealing (they don’t want them).
There is a downside to this example of demand in action. Smaller bank branches are being closed as the big providers consolidate their high street presence, keeping their staff costs low as they continue to develop their internet services. One result is that older people, like my 91 year-old Mum for example, is faced with the imminent prospect of her much-valued local branch closing down. It’s not that my Mum doesn’t want this branch. She does. The point is that she cannot ‘demand’ it, because she (even if she along with all her friends of a similar age all marched into the branch in protest at its closure) do not represent sufficient buying power.
Demands are therefore simply wants that are backed with the muscle of buying power!
VALUE PROPOSITIONS
When a company, in whatever field, sees that there are some potential customers out there who appear to need the product or service that they are skilled in providing, all they have to do is provide it, yes?
If only it were as simple as you (a paint manufacturer for example) spotting that some people do indeed like to paint things (their walls perhaps) and therefore confidently boosting your paint production. That’ll work won’t it? At least you are responding to a market need. Well, again, not quite.
Successful marketers tend to succeed not with a simple response to a perceived need or want (or even demand) but instead by creating what is known as a ‘value proposition’. A value proposition just refers to creating a set of benefits which will fulfil the customer’s need or want.
Let’s unpick that a little. The word benefit is important. Being beneficial means that something or someone does something good for someone. A benefit in our sense therefore does something good for your customer. And if you look closely at almost any customer in almost any scenario you’ll see that they are looking for something that does them some good, although the ‘good’ can vary.
One customer may be on a really tight budget, with minimal cash, but they want to cheer up the walls of their child’s bedroom or their kitchen. There’s the benefit they’re after, right there: cheery and refreshed rooms with absolute minimum negative impact on their purse. Do you have a value proposition for them (a low-cost range of basic but appealing colours)?
Another customer is looking for traditional hues and very high quality coverage to suit their painstakingly restored Georgian town house. Do you have a value proposition for them (a much wider range of subtler shade variations in a quality paint which is as close possible in look and feel to the coverings of 200 years ago)?
Neither of these customers is better or worse than the other. And you might serve either one or both very profitably. But you won’t achieve that by just making paint. No, you have to create the set of benefits which will meet and fulfil their specific needs or wants. That’s your ‘value proposition’.
MARKETING OFFERS
And once the value proposition (benefits that meet wants and needs) is created, is the job done? Sorry, not just yet. You know the old saying about building a better mousetrap and having the world beat a path to your door? It’s usually attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Actually he didn’t say exactly that. What he wrote was fuller and more interesting, and seductive … but still wrong. Emerson actually wrote:
‘If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.’
Emerson’s statement is enormously appealing. It plays to the producer in us: the farmer, the craftsman, the creator. All of Emerson’s examples (except for church organs) can be considered needs, and staple needs at that. Folk will always need food, building materials, furniture to sit on. But attractive as it is, this outlook is dangerously misleading. It is in effect the opposite of marketing, but it’s a position (a mousetrap if you like) that many companies, both large and small, walk right into and find themselves stuck in. Why? Because it leaves the customer out of the equation.
