Technology in Marketing Efforts for Each of the Areas: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place - Term Paper Example

? Marketing Question Technology has greatly impacted the way companies and organizations approach strategic marketing today; give an example of how companies (or you), can effectively use technology in marketing efforts for each of the “4 P’s” areas: product, Price, Promotion and Place Marketing can be referred as an effective set of practice of an organization in terms of generating value to the customers along with ensuring proper communication and delivery of the products and/or services in order to manage a feasible relationship with the clients in ways that offer profit assistance for both the organization and its stakeholders. With regard to the present technological advancements, the organizations are highly involving themselves in making proper utilization of technology in terms of increasing the productivity along with developing the distribution channels at a more cost effective and time consuming mode. Developing an effective marketing mix for the organizations is one of the crucial aspects in the present advanced technological era. The marketing mix comprises the concept of 4Ps of marketing including Products, Price, Place and Promotion, related to the products and/or services that are rendered by any organization. Product Product or service of an organization can be determined as the fundamental factor for the company in its growth portfolio. In the context of continuous advancement made in business activities, the organizations are highly focusing on their offerings with quality, affordability along with ensuing fulfillment of the customers’ desires from the specific product or service. Moreover, the organizations in the present scenario are concentrating upon making upgrades in their products and/or services frequently in order to attract customers’ attention or to generate their buying desire towards the developed or new products/services. Technology such as e-commerce based technology can be used by a company to derive consumers’ product related preference through online feedback mode so that it can create or customize products/services based on the desire of the consumers. Price Pricing of the product is also an important facet for the organizations that is correlated with the financial growth of the companies. A feasible pricing strategy enables to derive value of the products or services from its respective buyers according to the market demand of the product. The pricing strategy of any product/service is one of the major decisions for the organizations for a particular region or country. However, it represents the financial growth structure of the enterprise along with generating new buyers and retaining the existing purchaser with it. In this context, proper use of technology can be made such as online website can be used by the companies to put on sale their products. Pricing of such an online available product can be kept relatively low than that of a product kept at a retail store. As there is no basic need for a physical location to store the product, so the price margin can be adjusted likewise, benefiting a business concern to draw large number of customers. Place Place is also a significant part for the organizations to offer their products/services to the final consumers. According to the modern day’s selling perception, the place can be determined as a crucial factor to acquire the ultimate buyers for the products or services. However, the modern organizations are quite conscious about their source of offerings with regards to availing their services through e-commerce and non e-commerce approaches or both the concepts. Electronic media is one of the favorable and effective places for the modern organizations in order to provide their products and/or services to its targeted consumers. Promotion Promotion of products and/or services is a major element of the marketing mix that consigns to a practice of influencing the buyers by providing additional benefits within the products/services rendered by the organization. Moreover, an effective use of the process with various promotional features including price, quantity and other activities may encourage the prospective consumers of the products/services. Technology can be used in this context as well, as online media and social networking sites can be used as promotional tool, which are becoming a massively used source. Question 2: Define brand equity. Name three firms (other than Apple), that you feel have high brand equity and give examples of what do they do to expand this equity and ensure that it does not erode. How does the brand equity of each of these 3 companies compare to that of its top competitor/s? Brand Equity The brand equity of an organization comprises additional value that are offered with the products and/or services rendered by the organization. The supplementary value of the products or services may be reflected according to the feeling and the thinking of the buyers concerning brand along with the pricing strategies of its commodities. More significantly, the brand equity is one of the major assets, which represents intellectual and financial values to the organization. IBM, Microsoft and Coca Cola are a few of the higher brand equity deriving corporations in this present business marketplace. It has been observed that these organizations are able to satisfy their customers by providing feasible products along with ensuring higher value from purchase to each buyer. From the perspective of IBM, it can be stated that the organization acquired USD 100,849 million in the year 2011 with the growth rate of 17% as compared to the year of 2010. The company deals in Information Technology (IT) based products and services along with efficient consultant services for other business institutions. Moreover, the organization offers developed and innovative IT products and services in almost 170 countries across the globe. In the similar context, Microsoft Corporation is also well known for its extensive offering of IT products and services. With the offerings of quality based products and services the company has constructed its brand value of USD 78,243 million in 2011 with the growth of 2% as compared to the year of 2010. Microsoft Corporation is also well-known for serving with valuable IT products and services in all sectors including business, education, hospitality and other segments of business world. Moreover, Coca Cola is also renowned for ensuring a continuous growth of brand equity. The company is one of the largest food and beverage enterprises. It has been observed by the annual brand equity report that Coca Cola generated its brand value of USD 73752 million in 2011 and achieved 8% additional growth than 2010. According to the modern day business context, Apple Inc can be considered as the core competitor of IBM and Microsoft Corporation. Moreover, ensuring continuous innovation and decent products offering of Apple have significantly augmented its higher brand value than IBM and Microsoft. The company achieved 84% of its brand value in 2011 in comparison to the year 2010 and collected extensively i.e. USD 153285 million of its brand value in 2011. Question 3: As Peter Drucker states, “Because the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation.” With that in mind, explain each these concepts and how to leverage them to maximize your marketing plan’s success: Customer Lifetime Value, the 20-80 Rule, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and Personalized Marketing. Marketing and innovation are the basic and effective functions for an organization in terms of acquiring long-term relationship and sustainability with its customers in the competitive business world. Moreover, these are the fundamental elements of any business organization to compete and to achieve success through offering products and/or services to its final consumers. In the present day context, these components are highly required along with making technological advancement in terms of providing profitable goods or services. Consumer Lifetime Value (CLV) The main purpose of any business organization is to generate customers and to keep hold of them for a sustained long-time relationship for continuing the overall cash flow and revenue generation for the organization. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) focuses to assure uninterrupted retain process through providing valuable products/services to each of the buyer and the practice also refers to the importance of effective customer relationship with the business organization for increasing the long-term transactions with its customers. A feasible marketing plan and innovative product/service play a crucial role in order to maintain significant CLV derived out of the buyers of any organization. From the perspective of marketing, retaining the existing and the valuable customers is one of the critical practices for an organization. In addition, making new product development and improving product features are also important parts for the organization to increase customer lifetime value. The 20-80 Rule The 20-80 concept of marketing refers that top 20 percent of advantageous customers justifies 80 percent of firm’s profit. It simply possesses the idea that generation of 80 percent of an organization’s profit occurs from 20 percent of its valuable customers. The idea of the concept plays an important part to identify the favorable buyers along with assisting the enterprises to forecast future financial movements. With this concern, marketing and innovation play an important role to accumulate significant advantageous outcomes for the organization. A feasible marketing strategy along with innovative product line can significantly create the profit margin for the organization in keeping with the ‘20-80 rule’. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of the vital components for an organization to sustain long-term cash-flow or business growth through the business transactions. Moreover, the approach involves generating feasible relationship with the clients by rendering quality products/services through an innovative marketing plan with regard to optimizing customer satisfaction. Marketing and innovation play an exceptional role in customer relationship management by facilitating to create a favorable relationship with the customers through providing right information along with offering suitable products/services to the appropriate customers. Personalized Marketing Personalized marketing is one of the viable strategies, which is employed by most of the business organizations in the modern day context. The process involves allocating or providing product categorization according to the customer profile and their buying pattern. The method can be determined as a suitable practice of differentiating products or services of an organization from its competitors’ one and represents distinctive offerings of the products/services for individual client. Marketing technique is highly required to personalize any product or service through influencing the customers in their buying process. Moreover, the innovation facet also plays an imperative part in terms of categorizing or developing the appropriate products/services to each individual. Question 4: Hispanics are an immigrant group like no other. Their huge numbers and enduring link to their homeland and traditions are changing old ideas about assimilation. What does this mean when selling products directly related to this audience? Give 3 examples of companies that are targeting this group and what strategies are they using. The Hispanic segment in the United States significantly refers to those persons who are essentially from other countries such as Cuba, Mexico, Puerto-Rico along with South and Central American countries. In the present day context, the Hispanics are one of the fastest growing segments within the developed countries. The marketing plan for this segment is becoming more decisive due to its increasing cultural diversity along with decisive purchasing power of the Hispanic group. In relation to food and beverage production segment, companies such as PepsiCo, Kraft and General Mills are progressively more concentrating towards targeting the Hispanic segments within the US markets both in the advertising promotions along with new product development. From the perspective of PepsiCo which is a well-known global brand that offers food and beverage products is focusing to increase advertising campaigns for the Hispanic groups in the US market has aimed to collected large responses from the advertising campaigns promoted in the year 2010 with a small number of spending. In the similar context, Kraft is also increasing its investment on marketing movements for the Hispanic segment in the US market. In the year 2011, the company commenced seven new marketing and advertising campaigns targeting the specified segment. Similarly, General Mills also has focused on Hispanic segment by promoting its marketing and advertising activities as it has been projected household food related spending of the Hispanics would increase by 5.7% throughout the upcoming decade. The global organizations are highly focusing on the Hispanic segment due to the increasing rate of their household and per capita incomes. Question 5: In 2012, measuring and managing return on investment (ROI) from marketing and advertising spending has become a must for most companies. What are the key ROI metrics/measures for marketing/advertising efforts and how can organizations use technology and other means to efficiently collect these ROI metrics/measures? Measuring of marketing and advertising is one of the sophisticated tools, which has been applied by most of the organizations including new or dominating business institutions in the present scenario. The model used by the organizations facilitates to conduct the analysis of the present context of the business and to make development through ensuring effectiveness of marketing and advertisement activities of an organization. With this concern, the modern return on investment (ROI) metrics/measures have been observed to be quite effective for the organizations in terms of making proper alignment of the marketing and advertising activities with the objectives of the companies. The profitability measurement on ROI is an effective tool for the modern organizations in terms of managing their ROI on marketing and advertising. The modern technologies are playing a major role for the organizations to estimate and to manage ROI measures of their marketing and advertising activities. The modern computing methods and various developed tools are facilitating to enhance the effort to easily estimate or manage the ROI regarding marketing and advertising activities of an enterprise. A few of the major successful tools of the modern methods include Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) model among others. Online modes can also be used as a part of technological feature to collect customer feedbacks so that a company can derive crucial factors about any product’s ROI. Question 6: Briefly explain the stages of the Buyer Decision Process (also referred to as the Buyer’s Journey), and discuss how business buying behavior is different from consumer buying behavior. What does this mean for a B2C company attempting to expand into the B2B space? Buyer Decision Process It is very important for an organization to identify consumers’ buying process that can be determined as one of the major approaches with regard to offering products and/or services. With this concern, consumers run through five different stages in terms of acquiring any product or service rendered by any organization. They include: Need Recognition This is one of the preliminary and fundamental stages where the customer identifies the difficulty or need for buying any commodity or service. With this concern, the marketers need to identify the desires or the needs of the buyer by collecting information about the requirements and presenting the appropriate products or services as per the needs. Information Search The stage of information search entails to collect the information regarding the need and the requirement of a product or a service rendered by an organization. The consumer can collect information of required product or service from various sources. For example, internal source such as, collecting information from own or any reliable sources and external source including through electronic or non-electronic media. Alternatives Evaluation In this stage, the consumer seeks to select the right product among the alternatives from his/her selected brand. At this stage, the marketers should be conscious relating to offering alternative products or services to its targeted customers. Purchase Decision The intention for buying product or service is to develop and make proper evaluation before making final decision after the customer categorizes the brand. The buying decision of the consumer will be to purchase the desired products or services from the identified brand. Post-purchase Behavior This is the final stage for the marketers to contend with after a customer purchases any product or service. In this stage, the marketers should identify the satisfaction level of the customer concerning the purchased product from the company. Business buying behavior is significantly different from consumer buying behavior with regard to any product or service. Business purchases are generally completed in bulk quantity, whereas consumers’ purchase products generally one at a time. Business buying decisions are quite lengthy at times, as a number of hierarchies are involved in making final decision of purchase. However, in consumer buying process, decisions can be taken quite promptly. Therefore, such pertinent variations in the buying decision process in quite crucial to be considered by a company willing to switch to from B2C to B2B space. As in this instance, the purchase decision process of the consumers can be quite time consuming, so the company needs to keep patience and trust about its product offering. It also needs to provide or include more standardization in its offerings as in B2B buying process it can greatly help to attract more consumers. Read More