Let me put it to you like this. I will use this purely as an example .. you own a B&B but you dont market it properly. If you don't market it properly what are people going to think about your business? They won't be aware you have a B&B or that you have rooms available. Your prospects would think it is just an ordinary house. What does this entail for your business?
What does "marketing" mean?
Marketing can be both an organisation or customer orientated philosophy. It can also be a functioning department that handles activities concerned with understanding and satisfying customers needs.
Marketing is the action of promoting or selling your product or business, getting your message accross. Marketing plan activities are designed to increase your customers understanding and knowledge of existing products and services. Studies have shown a direct link between the success of an organisation and the extent of its market orientation. These marketing concepts are applicable to both profit and non-profit organisations.
Marketing plan activities are designed to increase your customer's understanding and knowledge of existing products and services. If a company has its own Marketing Department, Marketing is seen as ‘what the marketing department does’.
Marketing is the "key" element and fundamental rule of any business. I have spoken to thousands of business owners over the years who say they cannot afford to spend money on marketing....I will give you some free inside information. If you are a business owner you cannot afford NOT to spend money on your marketing activities.
You don't need to have a full operational Marketing Department you can outsource this side of the buisness to a Marketing Consultant. They can find out more about your business by doing market research which will enable you to find out who your target market is (if you don't know that already). As Jeff Bullhas said "Everyone" is not your target market. Where are you now? Where would you like to be? How are you going to get there? What are your brands core values? How would you like to be perceived? How are you currently being perceived in the marketplace? Who are your competitors? What are they doing? Market Research can also help to identify gaps in the market or market niches. You can do Market Research if your a new business about to launch to find out if there is a demand/gap/niche in the market for your service or you can tailor it accordingly prior to launcing. It also helps if your an existing business to do Market Research to find out your position within the marketplace, help your business to find out what your customers think, to identify your customers needs and to help you fulfill those needs. A SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) is also be beneficial at this stage.
Making sure you have a recognisable brand, using the services of a good Marketing Consultant to do a Brand Wheel. The Graphic Designer can then take the brand wheel and use it to come up with the corporate colours/image/font/size/type. By using the Brand Wheel it can help take difficult and often complex organisations into the simplest of words. Simplicity is the holy grail of communication, it offers straightforward clarity for those unfamiliar with the message and attempts to uncover the simple words through a systematic process. This works best with a mixed group of people who are familiar with the product/brand.
Using the Brand Wheel you work from the outside in, firstly going around the outer wheel and listing single words the first words that come into mind for each of four questions usually works best (ie what it does, how I would describe it, how it makes me feel, how it makes me look). Second, go into the middle wheel and again work through the four questions, distilling your original words from the outer wheel into fewer (ideally 3-5 per quadrant). This provides the basis for the inner wheel, where you summarise and prioritise the words from the middle wheel in fewer words. These words form the basis of your brand proposition.
The brand proposition is the building blocks for your communications, whether verbal, written or graphical. Everything you do can reflect these core words, and in turn provide a very focussed, very simple and very effective message to the consumer with your brands design, image, coporate colours and identity.Marketing can also be described as managing the exchange of relationships as described in the following extract:
Marketing consists of individual and organisational activities that facilitate and expedite satisfying exchange relationships in a dynamic environment through the creation, distribution, promotion and pricing of goods, services and ideas. Market led Approach or Pan Company Marketing. Spending money on a worthwhile cause. Examples of other exchange relationships are shown in Figure 1.
Piercy (1997) describes this approach to marketing as a market-led approach – others refer to it as pan-company marketing. The distinguishing feature of both these approaches is that they emphasise that every department in the organisation is involved with the customer – not just the marketing department. I shall use the terms market-led, market orientation and pan-company marketing throughout the text to describe this organisations customer-led approach.
Figure 1 Exchange relationships
Marketing is too important to leave to the marketing department.
(Bill Packard, Hewlett Packard, in Piercy, 1997)
There are 5 P's not 4 P's in Marketing. Price, Promotion, Product, Place & The 5th P is People. (Guy Zitter, MD, The Daily Mail)
The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) suggests that: Marketing is the management process for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customers needs at a profit.Can you see how the CIM has incorporated market-led concepts in there definition of marketing?
All organisations (commercial and non-profit) must be market oriented and must focus their attention on adding value to their products and services to satisfy their customers needs.
Leaving aside the word profit from the CIM's definition of marketing, at a conceptual level the process of becoming market orientated is concerned with identifying, anticipating and satisfying customers needs. Kotler (Drucker, 1992) believes that changes in funding and the introduction of competitive tendering have forced some organisations to use these customer-focused approaches to help them compete in their marketplace. Kotler explains:
Marketing really is spurred on by the presence and the increase in competition that the institution faces in a way that it never faced before. Most organizations don't get interested in marketing when they are comfortable. Suddenly they find that they don't understand their customers very well, and their customers are leaving that church, or they're not signing up for the college, or coming to that hospital. And these institutions become aware of a competitive situation.
How do you deal with a competitive situation? Well, one way some early hospitals dealt with it was to pray that the world hadn't changed and that they would just survive. Now, prayer may have a role to play, but it is not the answer. The normal answer is that may be there's something in this thing called marketing that will help us to understand why customers chose to be with us in the first place and why they're not choosing to be with us anymore.
(Drucker, 1992, p. 80)
To run a non-profit organisation effectively, the marketing must be built into the design of the service. This is very much a top management job, although, as in every other area, you need a lot of input from your people, from the market and from research.I hope this helps you to understand the importance of marketing for your business and how to implement a marketing strategy.
(Drucker, 1992)
Value Proposition
What Does Value Proposition Mean?
A business or marketing statement that summarizes why a consumer should buy a product or use a service. This statement should convince a potential consumer that one particular product or service will add more value or better solve a problem than other similar offerings.Investopedia explains Value Proposition
Companies use this statement to target customers who will benefit most from using the company's products, and this helps maintain an economic moat. The ideal value proposition is concise and appeals to the customer's strongest decision-making drivers. Companies pay a high price when customers lose sight of the company's value proposition.
