8020Info Capsule - A Framework for Marketing

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A Framework for Marketing

Every firm depends on marketing, since every business must sell a product or service to stay in business. Every company, therefore, needs a strategy for how it will handle the fundamental issue of getting its products or services into the hands of customers, which covers everything from researching the customer's need and developing the product or service to providing after-sale follow-up to ensure continuing sales.

Marketing is the foundation for your sales effort. But whereas selling involves convincing somebody you have what he or she wants, marketing is making sure you have what somebody wants. There are many definitions of marketing, but we're partial to the one that describes marketing as the effort to "sense, serve and satisfy" customers' needs.

Defining your "value proposition"...

Marketing strategy helps to define a "value proposition" of what you can provide that people will want and that differentiates you from competitors.

Philip Kotler, the pre-eminent marketing professor, says that "there is only one winning strategy. It is to carefully define the target market and direct a superior offering to that target market. The offering must be superior in one or more distinctive ways: better quality, more features, lower price, and more value for the money. Otherwise the firm is offering an imitation of someone else's product and lacks any original appealing quality."

Marketing strategy involves deciding the tradeoffs among what your company wants to offer, what your marketplace desires, and what the marketplace environment (economic conditions, competitors and alternative products) will allow or encourage.

Make 5P plans to bring strategy to life...

After devising a marketing strategy you need to put the details into that approach through developing a marketing plan. Often, however, you'll find that the two phases of planning and strategy can become intermingled, since dealing with elements of one can lead you to revise elements of the other.

In the plan, after selecting your target market, you will want to carefully consider the five Ps of marketing: Price, Place, Product, Promotion and Positioning.

You need a pricing strategy, of which premium or economy pricing are the most common but not the only issues to consider. You need to think about Place, the way you choose to reach customers, be it a physical location, a sales force, wholesalers, or the Internet. You need to think about the product - not taking it as a given but considering how it can best meet customer needs and fit your pricing strategy. You need to consider the various ways to promote your product.

Positioning - A Key "P"

The final P is increasingly considered one of the most important if not the most important: Positioning. You need to consider how you will position your offering in the minds of potential customers. Although positioning stems in part from the product, the concern is with how it is perceived in customer's minds and that come from a variety of factors, including price, name, quality, advertising, who you seem to want to serve, and even the words and tone of voice of your receptionist.

One quick tool for helping in targeting is to determine who your best customers are and then find out more about them through conversation or formal interviews with as many as you can, seeing what similarities exist. As well as thinking about marketing to new prospects, however, you must not forget the importance in your marketing plan of customer retention since studies show that can have a powerful effect on profitability.

Working the Plan

Once you have a plan, you must make it work. You must make sure that key people take ownership of elements of the plan. You also need to devise milestones along the way to check for progress, and measurements to evaluate how you're doing. You also need to make sure that all of your efforts are in alignment - that in implementing, you don't find yourself pursuing paths that undercut your strategy.

Marketing is both an art and a science. You must be creative. But you also must be rigorous, in analyzing your market and checking your progress, to achieve success.

If you would like more information or assistance with Marketing Strategies for your organization, please contact us.