Marketing

management

Marketing management is the strategic organizational discipline which focuses on the practical
application of marketing orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and
organizations and on the management of a firm's marketing resources and activities.

Structure
Marketing management employs 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.[1]

In competitor analysis, marketers build detailed profiles of each competitor in the market,
focusing 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 implies market research and marketing research to perform a
primary analysis. For this, a variety of techniques are implemented. Some of the most common
ones include:

Qualitative marketing research, such as

focus groups and various types of
interviews
Quantitative marketing research, such
as statistical surveys
Experimental techniques such as test
markets
Observational techniques such as
ethnographic (on-site) observation
Marketing managers may also design and oversee various environmental scanning and
competitive intelligence processes to identify trends and inform the company's marketing
analysis.
 Example of SWOT analysis chart

Brand audit
A brand audit is a thorough examination of a brand's current position in an industry compared to
its competitors and the examination of its effectiveness. When it comes to brand auditing, six
questions should be carefully examined and assessed:

1. How well the business's current

brand strategy is working,
2. What the company's established
resource strengths and weaknesses
are
3. What its external opportunities and
threats are
 4. How competitive the business's
prices and costs are
5. How strong the business's
competitive position in comparison
to its competitors is
6. What strategic issues are facing the
business
When a business conducts a brand audit, the goal is to uncover the business's resource
strengths, deficiencies, best market opportunities, outside threats, future profitability, and its
competitive standing in comparison to existing competitors. A brand audit establishes the
strategic elements needed to improve the brand position and competitive capabilities within the
industry. Once a brand is audited, any business that ends up with strong financial performance
and market position is more likely than not to have a properly conceived and effectively executed
brand strategy.

A brand audit examines whether a business's share of the market is increasing, decreasing, or
stable. It determines if the company's margin of profit is improving, or decreasing, and how
much it is in comparison to the profit margin of established competitors. Additionally, a brand
audit investigates trends in a business's net profits, the return on existing investments, and its
established economic value. It determines whether or not the business's entire financial strength
and credit rating are improving or getting worse. This kind of audit also assesses a business's
image and reputation with its customers. Furthermore, a brand audit seeks to determine whether
or not a business is perceived as an industry leader in technology, offering product or service
innovations, along with exceptional customer service, among other relevant issues that
customers use to decide on a brand of performance.
A brand audit usually focuses on a business's strengths and resource capabilities because these
are the elements that enhance its competitiveness. A business's competitive strengths can exist
in several forms. Some of these forms include skilled or pertinent expertise, valuable physical
assets, valuable human assets, valuable organizational assets, valuable intangible assets,
competitive capabilities, achievements and attributes that position the business into a
competitive advantage, and alliances or cooperative ventures.

The basic concept of a brand audit is to determine whether a business's resource strengths are
competitive assets or competitive liabilities. This type of audit seeks to ensure that a business
maintains a distinctive competence that allows it to build and reinforce its competitive
advantage. What's more, a successful brand audit seeks to establish what a business capitalizes
on best, its level of expertise, resource strengths, and strongest competitive capabilities, while
aiming to identify a business's position and future performance.

Marketing strategy
Two customer segments are often selected as targets because they score highly on two
dimensions:

1. The segment is attractive to serve

because it is large, growing, makes
frequent purchases, is not price
sensitive (i.e. is willing to pay high
prices), or other factors; and
 2. The company has the resources and
capabilities to compete for the
segment's business, can meet their
needs better than the competition,
and can do so profitably.[2]
A commonly cited definition of marketing is simply "meeting needs profitably".[3]

The implication of selecting target segments is that the business will subsequently allocate
more resources to acquire and retain customers in the target segments than it will for other, non-
targeted customers. In some cases, the firm may go so far as to turn away customers who are
not in its target segment. The doorman at a swanky nightclub, for example, may deny entry to
unfashionably dressed individuals because the business has made a strategic decision to target
the "high fashion" segment of nightclub patrons.

In conjunction with targeting decisions, marketing managers will identify the desired positioning
they want the company, product, or brand to occupy in the target customer's mind. This
positioning is often an encapsulation of a key benefit the company's product or service offers
that is differentiated and superior to the benefits offered by competitive products.[4] For
example, Volvo has traditionally positioned its products in the automobile market in North
America in order to be perceived as the leader in "safety", whereas BMW has traditionally
positioned its brand to be perceived as the leader in "performance".

Ideally, a firm's positioning can be maintained over a long period of time because the company
possesses or can develop, some form of sustainable competitive advantage.[5] The positioning
should also be sufficiently relevant to the target segment such that it will drive the purchasing
behavior of target customers.[4] To sum up, the marketing branch of a company is to deal with
the selling and popularity of its products among people and its customers, as the central and
eventual goal of a company is customer satisfaction and the return of revenue.
Implementation planning

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": 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.

Taken together, the company's implementation choices across the 4 P's 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's objectives. The content of
marketing plans varies for each 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 Ps)

Project, process, and vendor

management
More broadly, marketing managers work to design and improve the effectiveness of core
marketing processes, such as new product development, brand management, marketing
communications, and pricing. Marketers may employ the tools of business process re-
engineering to ensure these processes are properly designed, and use a variety of process
management techniques to keep them operating smoothly.

Effective execution may require management of both internal resources and a variety of external
vendors and service providers, such as the firm's advertising agency. Marketers may therefore
coordinate with the company's Purchasing department on the procurement of these services.
Under the area of marketing agency management (i.e. working with external marketing agencies
and suppliers) are techniques such as agency performance evaluation, scope of work, incentive
compensation, ERFx's and storage of agency information in a supplier database.
Reporting, measurement, feedback
and control systems
Marketing management employs a variety of metrics to measure progress against objectives. It
is the responsibility of marketing managers to ensure that the execution of marketing programs
achieves the desired objectives and does so in a cost-efficient manner.

Marketing management therefore often makes use of various organizational control systems,
such as sales forecasts, and sales force and reseller incentive programs, sales force
management systems, and customer relationship management tools (CRM). Some software
vendors have begun using the term customer data platform or marketing resource management
to describe systems that facilitate an integrated approach for controlling marketing resources.
In some cases, these efforts may be linked to various supply chain management systems, such
as enterprise resource planning (ERP), material requirements planning (MRP), efficient
consumer response (ECR), and inventory management systems.

International marketing management

Globalization has led some firms to market beyond the borders of their home countries, making
international marketing a part of those firms' marketing strategy.[6] Marketing managers are
often responsible for influencing the level, timing, and composition of customer demand. In part,
this is because the role of a marketing manager (or sometimes called managing marketer in
small- and medium-sized enterprises) can vary significantly based on a business's size,
corporate culture, and industry context. For example, in a small- and medium-sized enterprises,
the managing marketer may contribute in both managerial and marketing operations roles for
the company brands. In a large consumer products company, the marketing manager may act as
the overall general manager of his or her assigned product.[7] To create an effective, cost-
efficient marketing management strategy, firms must possess a detailed, objective
understanding of their own business and the market in which they operate.[2] In analyzing these
issues, the discipline of marketing management often overlaps with the related discipline of
strategic planning.

See also

Marketing effectiveness
Predictive analytics
Strategic management
Outline of marketing

References

1. Porter, Michael (1998). Competitive

Strategy (revised ed.). The Free Press.
ISBN 0-684-84148-7.
2. Clancy, Kevin J.; Peter C. Kriegafsd (2000).
Counter intuitive Marketing (https://archive.
org/details/counterintuitive00clan) . The
Free Press. ISBN 0-684-85555-0.

3. Kotler, Philip.; Kevin Lane Keller (2006).

Marketing Management, 12th ed (https://ar
chive.org/details/marketingmanagem00phi
l) . Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-
145757-8.

4. Ries, Al; Jack Trout (2000). Positioning: The

Battle for Your Mind (20th-anniversary ed.).
McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-135916-8.

5. Porter, Michael (1998). Competitive

Advantage (revised ed.). The Free Press.
ISBN 0-684-84146-0.
 6. Joshi, Rakesh Mohan, (2005) International
Marketing, Oxford University Press, New
Delhi and New York ISBN 0-19-567123-6

7. Kotler, P. and Keller, K.L. Marketing

Management, 12th ed., Pearson, 2006,
ISBN 0-13-145757-8

Further reading

Lenskold, James D. (2003). The Path to

Campaign, Customer, and Corporate
Profitability by James D. Lenskold (http
s://books.google.com/books?id=-ByzlitS
B9QC) . McGraw-Hill Professional.
ISBN 0-07-141363-4. Retrieved
2008-11-03.
Patterson, Laura (2008). Marketing
Metrics in Action: Creating a
Performance-Driven Marketing
Organization. Racom Communications.
ISBN 978-1-933199-15-3.
Klein, A. S.; Masi, R. J.; Weidner II, C. K.
(1995). "Organization Culture,
Distribution and Amount of Control, and
Perceptions of Quality: An Empirical
Study of Linkages". Group & Organization
Management. 20 (2).
doi:10.1177/1059601195202004 (http
s://doi.org/10.1177%2F1059601195202
004) . S2CID 145719140 (https://api.se
 manticscholar.org/CorpusID:14571914
0) .

External links

Marketing at Wikibooks
Quotations related to Marketing
management at Wikiquote

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title=Marketing_management&oldid=1211761681"

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