Marketing Unit1

Marketing Management 1
MARKETING MANAGEMENT
Unit-I: Marketing and its Environment
Definition - Role of marketing - Concepts of marketing - Production concept - Product concept -

Selling concept - Marketing concept - Societal marketing, Relationship Marketing concept; Tasks of
Marketing; Marketing Environment - Macro and Micro Environment - Marketing strategies - Market
Leader Strategies - Market follower Strategies - Market Challenger Strategies and Market Niche
Strategies
Definition:
Marketing deals with identifying and meeting human and social needs. One of the shortest
definitions of marketing is “meeting needs profitably.”
marketing is a societal process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and
want through creating, offering, and exchanging products and services of value freely with
others.
The American Marketing Association offers this managerial definition: “Marketing

Management is the process of planning and executing the conception, ricing, promotion,
and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual
and organizational goals.”
Role of Marketing:
1. Meets consumer needs and wants:

Needs pre-exist in market. Marketers identify the needs of the consumer and adopt their
marketing strategies accordingly. They influence wants, as these are shaped by cultural and
individual personalities. Their needs are satisfied through the exchange process.
2. Ensures organization survival, growth and reputation:

A business survives because of customer retention and increase in the market share.
Marketing helps companies achieve their objectives because it is customer-centric. Marketing
helps in satisfying customers beyond their expectations.
ACME BUSINESS SCHOOL PGDM

3. Widens market:
Marketers use mass communication tools such as advertising, sales, promotion, event
marketing and PR to promote their products far and wide. Moreover, PR programmes build
and protect a company’s image and product. Revolutions in media technology have made
marketing more interactive.
4. Adapting the right price:

Price is a critical element in the marketing mix of a producer because it generates revenue.
Marketing strategies help in setting fair prices, incorporating appropriate changes, and
preparing a right approach. The exchange process moves smoothly when prices are fixed in a
favourable manner.
5. Better product offerings:

Most companies sell more than one product. Physical products, that is goods have to be well
packed and labelled. In contrast, services are characterized by intangibility and inseparability.
Thus, marketing plays an active role by designing and managing product offerings.
6. Creates utility:
Much of a product’s utility is created through marketing. Utility is the ability of a product to
satisfy wants. Marketing creates form, place, time, information and possession utility. For
example, a car fulfils the need to possess a vehicle and ride it.
7. Management of demand:
Marketers are skilled professionals who play a key role in influencing level, timing and
composition of demand. A demand can be a negative demand, no demand, latent demand,
declining demand, irregular demand, full demand or overfull demand. Marketing helps in
dealing with these varied levels of demand.
8. Face competition:
Competitive orientation is important in today’s global markets. Marketing helps in
maintaining balance of consumers’ expectations and competitor’s offerings by monitoring the
market closely. Superior services, premium products and efficient dealership are used by
marketers to retain their market share.

9. Discharge social responsibilities:

Rising customer expectations, government pressure and environmental degradation have
forced companies to practice higher levels of social responsibilities. Here, social marketing
plays an important role. Cause-related marketing is widely used by big corporate houses. For
example, through the promotion of low-priced Lifebuoy, Hindustan Unilever Limited spreads
hygiene awareness in rural areas.
10. Economic growth:

Marketing creates demand. Increased demand encourages production and distribution
activities. As a result, industrial growth is boosted and income levels improve due to
increased employment opportunities. This improves the standard of living by offering
superior and improved products. Thus, the overall economic growth is boosted.
Concepts of Marketing:
Marketing concepts relate to the philosophy a business use to identify and fulfil the needs of
its customers, benefiting both the customer and the company. Same philosophy cannot result
in a gain to every business, hence different businesses use different marketing concepts.
The ‘marketing concept’ proposes that in order to satisfy the organizational objectives, an
organization should anticipate the needs and wants of consumers and satisfy these more
effectively than competitors. This concept originated from Adam Smith’s book The Wealth
of Nations, but would not become widely used until nearly 200 years later.
Given the importance of customer needs and wants in marketing, we have to understand them
correctly.
They have been defined long time ago as this:

 Needs: Something necessary for people to live a healthy, stable and safe life. When
needs remain unfulfilled, there is a clear adverse outcome: a dysfunction or death.
Needs can be objective and physical, such as the need for food, water and shelter; or
subjective and psychological, such as the need to belong to a family or social group
and the need for self-esteem.
 Wants: Something that is desired, wished for or aspired to. Wants are not essential
for basic survival and are often shaped by culture.

 Demands: When needs and wants are backed by the ability to pay, they have the
potential to become economic demands.
There are numerous marketing concepts which are used by marketers as a reference in the
marketing field. Some of these marketing concepts exist to date, while some others are
outdated and have been taken over by other marketing concepts.
The five marketing concepts
The five marketing concepts are:
1. Production concept
2. Product concept
3. Selling concept
4. Marketing concept
5. Societal marketing concept
6. Relationship Marketing concept
Let’s take a closer look at each one.

The production concept:
When the production concept was defined, a production-oriented business dominated the
market. This was from the beginning of capitalism to the mid 1950’s.
During the era of the production concept, businesses were concerned primarily
with production, manufacturing, and efficiency issues. Companies that use the production
concept have the belief that customers primarily want products that are affordable and
accessible.
The production concept is based on the approach that a company can increase supply as it
decreases its costs. Moreover, the production concept highlights that a business can lower
costs via mass production.
A company oriented towards production believes in economies of scale (decreased
production cost per unit), wherein mass production can decrease cost and maximize profits.
As a whole, the production concept is oriented towards operations.
The product Concept:
This concept works on an assumption that customers prefer products of

greater quality and price and availability doesn’t influence their purchase decision. And so,
company develops a product of greater quality which usually turns out to be expensive.
One of the best modern examples would be IT companies, who are always improving and
updating their products, to differentiate themselves from the competition. Since the main
focus of the marketers is the product quality, they often lose or fail to appeal to customers
whose demands are driven by other factors like price, availability, usability, etc.
The selling Concept
Production and product concept both focus on production but selling concept focuses on
making an actual sale of the product. Selling concept focuses on making every possible sale
of the product, regardless of the quality of the product or the need of the customer.
The selling concept highlights that customers would buy a company’s products only if the
company were to sell these products aggressively. This philosophy doesn’t include

building relations with the customers. This means that repeated sales are rare, and
customer satisfaction is not great.
The marketing Concept
A company that believes in the marketing concept places the consumer at the centre of the
organization. All activities are geared towards the consumer. A business, aims to understand
the needs and wants of a customer. It executes the marketing strategy according to market
research beginning from product conception to sales.
By focusing on the needs and wants of a target market, a company can deliver more value
than its competitors. The marketing concept emphasizes the “pull” strategy”. This means
that a brand is so strong that customers would always prefer your brand to others’.
The societal marketing Concept:
This is a relatively new marketing concept. While the societal marketing concept highlights
the needs and wants of a target market and the delivery of better value than its competitors, it
also emphasizes the importance of the well-being of customers and society as a
whole (consumer welfare or societal welfare).
The societal marketing concept calls upon marketers to build social and ethical considerations
into their marketing practices. They must balance and juggle the often-conflicting criteria of
company profits, consumer want satisfaction, and public interest.
Relationship marketing Concepts:
Relationship marketing is a facet of customer relationship management (CRM) that focuses

on customer loyalty and long-term customer engagement rather than shorter-term goals like
customer acquisition and individual sales. The goal of relationship marketing (or customer
relationship marketing) is to create strong, even emotional, customer connections to a brand
that can lead to ongoing business, free word-of-mouth promotion and information from
customers that can generate leads.
Relationship marketing stands in contrast to the more traditional transactional

marketing approach, which focuses on increasing the number of individual sales. In the
transactional model, the return on customer acquisition cost may be insufficient. A customer
may be convinced to select that brand one time, but without a strong relationship marketing

strategy, the customer may not come back to that brand in the future. While organizations
combine elements of both relationship and transactional marketing, customer relationship
marketing is starting to play a more important role for many companies.
Effective relationship marketing involves a variety of overlapping strategies and technologies

that help foster a deeper, long-term relationship with current and prospective customers.
Importance of relationship marketing
Acquiring new customers can be challenging and costly. Relationship marketing helps retain
customers over the long term, which results in customer loyalty rather than customers
purchase once or infrequently.
Relationship marketing is important for its ability to stay in close contact with customers. By
understanding how customers use a brand’s products and services and observing additional
unmet needs, brands can create new features and offerings to meet those needs, further
strengthening the relationship.

Implementing a relationship marketing strategy
Relationship marketing is based on the tenets of customer experience management (CEM),

which focuses on improving customer interactions to foster better brand loyalty. While these
interactions can still occur in person or over the phone, much of relationship marketing and
CEM has taken to the Web.
With the abundance of information on the Web and flourishing use of social media, most
consumers expect to have easy, tailored access to details about a brand and even expect the
opportunity to influence products and services via social media posts and online reviews.
Today, relationship marketing involves creating easy two-way communication between
customers and the business, tracking customer activities and providing tailored information to
customers based on those activities.
For example, an e-commerce site might track a customer's activity by allowing them to create
a user profile so that their information is conveniently saved for future visits, and so that the
site can push more tailored information to them next time. Site visitors might also be able to
sign in through Facebook or another social media channel, allowing them a simpler user
experience and automatically connecting them to the brand's social media presence.
This is where CRM and marketing automation software can support a relationship marketing
strategy by making it easier to record, track and act on customer information. Social CRM
tools go further by helping to extend relationship marketing into the social media sphere,
allowing companies to more easily monitor and respond to customer issues on social media
channels, which in turn helps maintain a better brand image.
Benefits of relationship marketing:
Higher customer lifetime value (CLV). Relationship marketing creates loyal customers,

which leads to repeat purchases and a higher CLV. In addition, loyal customers are likely to
become brand advocates or ambassadors, recommending products and services to friends,
family and business associates.

 Reduction in marketing and advertising spend. Spending on marketing and

advertising to acquire new customers can be expensive. Relationship marketing causes
customers to do the marketing for a brand, in what’s called buzz marketing. Customers
tell others about a brand’s products and services, which can drive sales. Brands with
exceptional relationship marketing programs spend little to no money on marketing or
advertising.
 Stronger organizational alignment around the customer. Organizations that

emphasize relationship marketing have a stronger organizational alignment around an
exceptional customer experience. The teams work together to create satisfied and happy
customers over the long term.
Examples of relationship marketing
There are several types of activities brands can use to facilitate relationship marketing,
including:
 Provide exceptional customer service, as customers who are consistently impressed

by a brand’s customer service are more likely to remain loyal to the brand.
 Thank customers through a social media post or with a surprise gift card.
 Solicit customer feedback through surveys, polls and phone calls, which can create a
positive impression that customer opinions are valued and help to create better products
and services.
 Launch a loyalty program that rewards customers for their continued patronage.
 Hold customer events to connect with customers and build a community.
 Create customer advocacy or brand advocacy programs to reward customers who

provide word-of-mouth advertising on a brand’s behalf.
 Offer discounts or bonuses to long-time or repeat customers.
Major Tasks of Marketing for the Success in Marketing

Marketing management has to do a set of tasks necessary for success in marketing. The basic
tasks of marketing are as follows:

1. Develop marketing strategies and plans
The first and foremost tasks of marketing are to develop marketing strategies and plans. They
consist of following tasks:
 Determining the strategies consist of identifying the marketing objectives or goals of

the organization, their determination, and modification as well as determination of specific
resources to achieve objectives or goals set. They are concerned with product, price, channel,
promotion, competitors, etc.
 Marketing plans involve mangers by which the marketing goals can be achieved.
They involve deciding policy, strategy, tactics, procedures, rules and regulations and
marketing programs, budgets and schedules to achieve the long-term as well as short-term
goals.
 Marketing strategies and plans allocate economic, physical and managerial resources
of the organization for future.
 They assess and analyse strength and weakness, opportunities and threats (SWOT).
2. Creating marketing information system
It is concerned with understanding what is happening inside and outside the company. Simply
there are four components of marketing information. They are Internal Record System,
Marketing Intelligence System, Marketing Research and Decision Support System.
3. Build customer relationship

Marketing needs to build customer relationship. Building customer relationship is a very
effective way to increase satisfaction and sustain in market. The relationships can be built by
using the emerging concepts such as relationship marketing and customer
relationship management.

4. Build strong brands

Marketing needs to build strong brand. It is also a major task of marketing. Strong brand
helps in promotion, value creating, image development, product positioning, brand loyalty
and expansion of product lines.
5. Determine marketing mix

Marketing needs to create and determine and effective marketing mix to satisfy needs of
target markets. It is the combination of four inputs such as the product, the price, the place
and the promotional activities. Different marketing mix is essential for different groups of
customers.
6. Deliver value
Marketing needs to deliver value to the target customers. Value is the ratio between what the
customers pay and what they receive. Marketing must determine how to properly deliver the
value embodied by the products and services to the target market. Customers’ product choice
is guided by value. So, marketing should add maximum value to the customers.
7. Communicate value
Marketing needs to communicate value to target markets. It has to develop an integrated
marketing communication program that maximizes the individual and
collective contribution of all communication activities by which firm attempts to inform,
persuade, remain and reassure consumers about the brands. For this, marketing has to set up
mass communication programs consisting of advertising, personal selling, sales promotion,
public relations and publicity.
8. Create long-term growth

Marketing must take a long-term view of its products and brands and how its profits should
be grown. Based on its positioning, it must initiate new-product development, testing and
launching.
9. Implementation and control

Marketing must organize its marketing resources and implement and control the marketing
plans. It must build a marketing organization that is capable of implementing marketing plans
and strategies. Similarly, it must find out any deviations between achieved performances
against planned or budgeted performance using predetermined standards. It provides
feedback about marketing planning and strategies.

Marketing Environment:
A company’s marketing environment consists of all the factors and forces outside
marketing that affect management’s ability to develop and maintain successful
transactions with its target customers – Kotler and Armstrong
Marketing Environment involves forces that directly or indirectly influence an
organisation’s capability to market its product successfully
COMPONENTS OF MARKETING ENVIRONMENT
Let’s talk about the components of the marketing environment. As you already know the way
a company plays to the forces that affect its market environment are important determinants
of the prospects of the company. These forces can be broadly divided into two main
components. The internal and external environments.

THE INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

The internal environment as a component of the marketing environment is important forces
within the boundaries of a company. Let’s break it down with these 5Ms. Men, Money,
Machinery, Materials, Marketing strategy.
1. Men:
An efficient and effective workforce with a good work ethic and interpersonal
relationship is handy if you must have a decisive advantage over your competitors in
the market. And each person in every department must work with the concept of the
marketing environment in their mind.
2. Money:
Yeah, you need a good budget for the finance at your disposal as this will help in
your marketing and sales activities. For example, a small business that can’t afford a
full-fledged in-house marketing team can resort to hiring outside contractors.
3. Machinery:
You can have the best team in the world but with a below standard working tool.
They will find it difficult to squeeze out good success from the market cos this will
affect their efficiency.
4. Materials:
You should work hard always to deliver products that are appealing to your
customers. Therefore, make improvements, introduce innovations, and retain the ones
that sustain the audiences’ interest. Google is a good example of this, they make too
many innovations, after some years they archive the ones that didn’t thrive well in the
market and keep those that are doing a great job.
5. Marketing strategy:
A comprehensive review of marketing strategies should be done by businesses from
time to time to know the ones that are most compatible with their marketing
environment.

THE EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

The external environment consists of factors outside the boundaries of the company. The
factors that are under this component of marketing environment would be further divided into
the micro and macro external environment. These 2 components of the external marketing
environment are not as within control of the business owner as the internal marketing
environment. So, Let’s take a good look at them.
Micro Environment
This component of the external marketing environment consists of factors that are usually
directly related but outside the boundaries of the company. It consists of customers, partners,
and competitors.
1. Customers:
The signature phrase of Jeff Bezos when he started Amazon.com was ‘customer
obsession’. Consequently, he would place an empty chair, which is a symbol of the
customer, in company meetings reminding major decision-makers the role of the
customer. So, you need to understand your customers, create campaigns properly
targeted at them, and most importantly, provide a good customer care service that will
help ingrain your business as part of their daily life.
2. Partners:
These refer to marketing intermediaries, financiers, and advertising agencies.
Marketing intermediaries are people that help promote, sell, and distribute their
products to final buyers. They include resellers, physical distribution firms, and
financial intermediaries.
3. Competitors:
A company must have a good understanding of the big boys in their industry and
know their position relative to these big boys. They can learn from these guys and
even develop strategic advantages over them.
Having gone through the micro-component of the external marketing environment let’s
progress to the macro-component of the external marketing environment.

Macro Environment
This component is the furthest away from the control of a firm, it consists of factors that
affect the whole industry where a company function. They include demography, economy,
natural forces, technology, politics, and culture.
1. Demography:
A shoe manufacturing company produces kids’ shoes in quantities much larger than
the real population of that age range in the market. Now the end result of this is
chaotic but it happens folks. So, a business ought to consistently update itself with the
relevant demographic data of its market.
2. Economy:
Investment rates, inflation rates, exchange rates influence the marketing environment.
Individuals will buy products when they can afford it. Inflation weakens the
purchasing power of currency and this can have a crippling effect in a market.
3. Natural forces:
The annual report of the British Petroleum plc as at the end of 2013 on proved global
oil reserves estimates that the earth has nearly 1.688 trillion barrels of crude.
Afterward, companies in the industry started reacting to discover new oils by
application of A.I. This is a good example of natural forces affecting the whole
industry in a marketing environment.
4. Politics:
Big companies that lobby the legislature of different countries understand this very
well. Because it will result in the legislature enacting laws that help them thrive.
MARKETING ENVIRONMENT ANALYSIS

So, now you know about the concept and components of the marketing environment. But
how do you get a good grip on these forces? It’s not so hard. With this in mind, let’s talk
about Marketing environment analysis. Since the employer can control his internal
environment but has less control of the external environment. Market environment analysis
tools are available to help with the external environment. So, there are lots of these tools. But
the PESTLE tool is the most popular because of its simplicity and efficiency. In fact, some

small businesses use just the PEST tool which is simpler. Now, we’re going to list the things
to consider under each factor in the PESTLE market analysis tool.
 Politics:
Future government stability, foreign government policies, the extent of government
involvement in trade unions, tax laws.
 Economic factors:
Labour cost, interest rates, fiscal and monetary policy, stock market trends, inflation
rate, exchange rate.
 Social factors:
Buying behaviour, income level, family size, attitude towards saving and investment.
 Technological factors:
Rate of technological advancement, communication infrastructure.
 Legal factors:
Consumer protection laws, employee protection laws, Government procurement laws,
Laws of health and safety at the workplace.
IMPORTANCE OF MARKETING ENVIRONMENT

No matter what. Don’t let this knowledge slip out to your mind, “moving with the tide in
business has lots of benefits”. So, really quick, let’s take a look at the importance of the
marketing environment.
1. Understanding customers:
You can use any method to ingrain this importance into your head. Customers are the
sole aim of every business. So, if you go against them you might not like the end
result.
2. Exploiting the trends:

You never move against the trend in any industry. It is just uncool to do that.
3. Timely identification of threats and opportunities:

This importance helps the business to position itself always on a solid foundation
despite what that’s going on in the market. For instance, Jeff Bezos is a good example
even with the current pandemic his net-worth is rising.
4. Understanding competition in your niche:

The concept of the marketing environment helps businesses realize every opportunity
presented by competition and strike decisively.
So far so good. From the concept to components, then to the importance of the marketing
environment. Now the next stop is for you elite readers, that read till the end.
Marketing Strategies:

Company marketing strategy is an important and crucial thing in the organization and in the
business field. It is constituent for the global market. Marketing strategies can be different
from each other based on the organization who stimulates it, the place and product where it
should be applied. In order to achieve a satisfactory and adequate marketing strategy which
has a positive outcome on global and overall firm success, the marketing department within
a company should bear in mind all the different marketing mix strategies that can influence
the comprehensive result and the cumulative firm success.
Marketing strategy is a significant driving force that distinguishes the success of many
organizations not only by well-developed marketing strategies outlining where, when, and
how the firm will complete but also by their ability to execute the marketing strategy decision
options chosen. The appropriate and effectively implemented marketing strategies are
required to productively guide the development of the limited available resources via the
firm’s marketing capabilities in pursuit of desired goals and objectives.
Two important dimensions to consider for your marketing strategy are the target market you
are active in
B2B or B2C, and whether you will deploy your campaigns via paid media or only organic
media.
The 6 types of marketing strategies that work:
 Word-of-mouth
 Content marketing
 Local marketing
 Email marketing
 Performance marketing
 Influencer marketing
1. Word-of-mouth marketing
There is nothing better than word-of-mouth — if the word that circulates is positive.
Recommendations from other people are one of the most powerful marketing methods you
can use.

The problem: it’s slow. And the longer your business cycle, the slower the word-of-mouth
becomes. You can address the speed issue by soliciting testimonials, recommendations, and
reviews on social media.
Suggest happy clients leave a review on Google, Facebook, and Amazon if your business
uses those. Word-of-mouth marketing is great, but it's rarely sufficient as a marketing
strategy.
2. Content marketing
Content marketing is a pull strategy where you use content to attract users to your offering.
It’s used for both B2B and B2C. Content marketing identifies the right content to produce,
which can then be found via search engines and posted on social media.
The main disciplines you must use in content marketing are SEO (search engine
optimization) and community management for social media.
With inbound marketing, there is often a push element, where paid media is used to amplify
and distribute the content more broadly, or more precisely, to reach the right target market.
Inbound marketing is primarily used in B2B.

Content is the core element of your online presence, which is naturally distributed via search
and social media, and it can be further amplified with paid media.
3. Local marketing
Local marketing targets an audience within a specific geographic area. It’s clearly a B2C type
of marketing. Formerly, it was carried out via billboards and yellow pages, but the hyper-
targeting capabilities of digital media has added a wide range of opportunities for local
marketing online.
SEO is probably the most important digital marketing tactic for a small business looking to
do local marketing. Think of it as the yellow pages of the digital age.
With regards to digital billboards, social media advertising can precisely address people who
find themselves within the designated radius of the point of sale, such as a retail store.
You can use discount codes to drive them to the store. Local marketing involves both SEO
and community management and can benefit from both paid search and paid social
advertising.
4. Email marketing
In an email marketing strategy, online and offline communication both aim to capture a
client’s email address to maintain an ongoing relationship via newsletters or email
automation.
It’s one of the preferred methods for B2B but can also work for B2C, and is especially
effective when decision cycles are long. Recurring email interactions maintain the
relationship while prospects move through the decision stages that can lead to becoming
clients.
The best way to manage a relationship via email is via marketing automation platforms,
which can keep track of user interactions over time.
5. Performance marketing
Performance marketing uses paid media and extensive tracking to maximize your marketing
activities results. "Performance" essentially means measuring the outcome from a promotion

strategy in a granular way to allow the marketer to improve and optimize campaigns
continuously.
Performance marketing is primarily used for B2C campaigns and is based on outbound
communications: social media campaigns and paid search and display.
Affiliate marketing is the most clear-cut performance marketing strategy, where partners are
commissioned on the results they generate.
Performance marketing can be effective but carries risks such as double-counting conversion
or cannibalizing other acquisition channels. It isn’t always as glorious as it sounds and is
clearly a high-stakes strategy.
6. Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is the premium version of word-of-mouth marketing. It’s based on
recommendations from famous and influential people, and is therefore much more powerful
than word-of-mouth between ordinary people.
In the B2B version of influencer marketing, the marketer will build partnerships and PR
relationships with key opinion leaders.
In the B2C version, marketers establish a sponsorship agreement with a macro-influencer, a

person who fits the company’s brand values and has an important reach into its target market.
Another influencer marketing strategy deploys several micro-influencer partnerships to
promote your product or service.
These can be found through influencer marketing platforms. The key to a successful
influencer marketing strategy is to find the best alignment of your brand and influencer
profiles.
Marketing strategy is the section of your business plan that outlines your overall game plan
for finding clients and customers for your business. Sometimes marketing strategy is
confused with a marketing plan, but they are different.
 Marketing strategy focuses on what you want to achieve for your business and
marketing efforts.
 Marketing plan details how you'll achieve those goals.

A good marketing strategy incorporates what you know about how your business fits into the
market and the 5 Ps of marketing to develop the tactics and actions that will achieve your
marketing objectives.
When Is a Marketing Strategy Developed?
The marketing strategy is created before you start your business.
You can't effectively market your home business without understanding how it fits into the
marketplace, your competition, how you'll compete, and what you need to achieve (i.e. sales
numbers) to reach your financial goals.
The information you gather in creating the marketing strategy is then used to create your
marketing plan, and start your business.
How to Create a Marketing Strategy
Before writing your marketing strategy, you need to know how your product or service
benefits others and how it's unique (unique selling proposition) to other businesses in the
marketplace. Further, you need to do market research to understand your competition,
your target market, and other factors that will impact your ability to reach and entice people
to your business.
Once you have your research, you can write your marketing strategy incorporating the 5 Ps of
your marketing mix:
Product: What you selling? What are the physical attributes of your product or the
uniqueness of your service? How is what you offer different from your competitors and what
benefits does it provide your customer?
Price: What will it cost to get your product or service? How does it compare to your
competition? What will your profit margin be by selling at that price?
Place: Where will your products and services be available for purchase? This is beyond
having a home office, and instead are the places where consumers are able to buy. If you're in
multiple places, you should work to calculate the percentage of sales from each place. For
example, what will your Internet marketing strategy be? What is your sales strategy? How

will the transaction take place, what is the cost of getting the product or service to the
consumer/client, and what will be your refund/return policy?
Promotion: How are you going to let the market know about your product or services? How
will you tell them about the features and benefits you provide to entice them to check out
what you offer? What marketing tactics will you use and what do you anticipate will be the
results of each method? Include information about any incentives or coupons you'll use to
attract business.
People: This is a newly added "P" to the marketing mix, and is important if other people are
involved in helping you create or deliver your product or service. Who are these people (i.e.
sales people, virtual assistants) and what do they do (i.e. sales calls, customer service)? What
is their level of training and/or experience in providing help to your business?
Market leaders Strategies:
7 strategies of market leaders in today’s world, there is a rise in both, the number of products
and the number of competitors in the market. Naturally everyone wants to be ahead of the
competition. But is everyone successful? Definitely not. Any market will have one single
market leader and not several market leaders!!! So, what is it that market leaders do correctly
to ward off their competitors? We look at some strategies which are common for every
market leader

1) Covering the market globally and locally: Look at companies like Coca Cola, Microsoft,
LG and others which are market leaders in their respective categories. You will find that each
one of these companies have products which are widespread and are known across the world.
However, the marketing strategy of each one of these products is customized according to the
market that they are serving.
2) Expand Smartly: Expanding just for the sake of growth can become disastrous. All
strategists know that keeping an eye on the cash flow of the business is the most important
thing for the growth of the organization. If your working capital is being used for expansion,
this will affect even the business units which are actually showing growth thereby causing
you to cut back on essential plans. Expansion is necessary for good business but it should not
come on the cost of a skewed working capital or cash flow as both can affect your survival.
3) Control costs: Look closely at the accounts of any good company and you will find ways
being implemented to manage costs. There is one basic equation for profits. Income less

Expenses is equal to profit. Thus, if you cut down your costs, your expenses automatically
come down thereby increasing the overall profit. The important thing here is to know what
are the major components in your costing. For example, in a product-based company,
Transportation, Rentals, Labour, distribution margins, etc are some expenses which are
costlier even than the raw materials which will be used in making a product. Hence knowing
each and every component of costing is crucial.
4) Implement good marketing plans: The crux of beating your competitors is to have your
own unique position in the mind of the consumers. This position should be highly attractive
and profitable. Only then you will gain advantages over time. There needs to be a proper
implementation of marketing plans.
5) Get the right people and retain them: In the services industry, you are as good as the
talent you have on board. Many software companies keep a part of their margin aside so that
they don’t have to lose software engineers when one project is complete. These engineers are
transferred to another project when the work is complete. A customer service manager would
never like to lose their best employee. A CEO will never like to lose his best performing
managers. Any company would not like to let go of efficient employees. Your employees and
stakeholders are your assets.
6)Focus on your customers: Several companies, while making profits, forget that the prime
reason they are still working is because the customers like their products. The day a company
forgets this principal, it is bound to fail. And hence, you need to be the best in this area.
Know your customers in and out. Do regular market studies and consumer buying behaviour
analysis to determine the mindset of the customer. A new technology which was being
underestimated by you, but has been implemented by a competitor, can attract your
customers attention and take away even your most loyal customers.
7) Be Informed: One of the basics of selling against competition is to know your

competitors. Consider the consumer durables segment. There would be 10 different
competitors in television and refrigerators segment. Furthermore, each of the competitors will
have ten different product lines. They would have high end refrigerators and televisions for
the Sec A customers and low end and lesser priced models for the price conscious segment.
You need to know your competitors and their product lines to launch product variants of your
own. On the other hand, you need to know all the products of all your competitors to launch a

product which is unique in the market and has the first mover advantage. Thus, information is
important.
Market Followers Strategies:
The rule of business is that when you are a market leader, there are definitely going to be
market followers. Many companies come out with a market follower strategy. In fact, in
today’s world, the competency of all companies is so high that innovation is quickly copied
or imitated in different formats. For example, Apple came out with the multi touch smart
phones, but today Samsung is leading that market in terms of total turnover. Thus, there are
several market follower strategies in effect in today’s business environment. Market
followers are bound to exist in a mature market. The market followers are wider in case of
online marketing because online marketing has lower entry barriers and higher returns. Thus,
in online commerce itself, you will see that companies like Snapdeal, Flipkart, Amazon,
Jabongg have all started one after the other. Off course, the market leaders were Ebay and
Amazon. But they are facing stiff competition nowadays.
There are 4 strategies of Market followers.

Adapter: Adapter is white collared market follower strategy. Automobiles use the
adaptation form of market follower strategy. Cars like Maruti 800, Alto, Zen, brio, etc are all
adapters and they adapt the best qualities from each other by changing the style of the
automobile. Similarly, there are technology adapters like the Dell laptop and Sony Vaio
laptop. These market followers have similar products but they try to adapt from their closest
competition. Adapters can soon become leaders as well because they can adapt, learn and
make a better product than the higher competition.
Imitation: Imitation is the best form of flattery. But such a flattery can cause a huge dent
in your profit margins if you are a product manufacturer. Imitators make use of your hard-
earned brand equity and give a product which has the same characteristics as yours, albeit at a
lower price. The difference might be that the new product is made from poor material or that
it does not have the service or promise that your brand can offer. Nonetheless, there is a huge
market for imitators where people want to buy products at lower cost as they can’t afford the
higher one. Imitation jewellery is probably the best and largest example of imitation as a
market follower strategy. Second example can be the imitation of Tata sky, where Tata sky is

the market leader and brought digital TV revolution to India but was soon imitated by
Videocon, Airtel, Reliance and others.
Cloner: There is a silver lining between an imitator and a cloner. An imitator might copy
some of your product qualities, but it maintains its own product qualities as well. For
example – timesjobs.com is an imitator of naukri.com, but then Timesjobs has its own unique
product characteristics as well. However, if you get watches made from Rado, or bags of
Gucci, with Rado spelled as RADA and Gucci spelled as GUCCA, then that’s cloning.
Cloning means making the same product as yours, but with very subtle difference. Cloning
makes advantage of the top brands and makes same to same products. The next time you are
in Bangkok, try to get the clones of Samsung phones. You will be surprised how similar the
original and the clone looks.
Counterfeiter The best example of counterfeiting is selling the originals via piracy. Where
cloning involves manufacturing of slightly altered products, counterfeiting involves thieving
and is a black-market follower strategy. The best example is pirated DVDs and CDs of
movies and music.
Market Challengers Strategies:
Any market you go in will always have market challengers. You have to challenge these
competitors instead of presenting a meek response to them. Only by challenging them head
on, you create a fear for future market entrants. At the same time, this challenge also ensures
that you move up the competitive ladder.
The mistake which most companies do is that they look at the top player of the industry
whenever they enter the market. They try to beat the top player only. But when entering a
market, your main competitor is the one around you and who is eating away even a small pie
of your market share. It is unlikely, that when you are the 5th or 6th brand in the market, then
the 1st brand will be your competitor. The 4 th and 3rd brand are the more likely market
challengers in your case.

Here is a 5-step process to accomplish the same.
1) Use a frontal attack
Observed most prominently in the smartphone market today, or more commonly in

the Pepsi vs Coca cola war since ages, a frontal attack is seen when a competitor attacks
another based on the strengths of the competitor.
Example – Pepsi introduces Diet Pepsi when Coke introduces Diet coke. Both have strength
of product expansion and a diverse product portfolio. So, in a direct frontal attack, Pepsi also
launches a product in response to its market challenger.
2) Flank attack
The above example of Pepsi and coke contains 2 brands which are very strong in the FMCG
market and have no other competitor. Thus, they use frontal attacks. But what if a small
player has to take on a mammoth. Then the player uses a flank attack and attacks the
competition based on its weaknesses.

Example – Many technology firms like AMD vs Intel, Apple vs Microsoft, and others operate

on the basis of Flank attack.
3) Encirclement attack
This form of market challenger strategy is used when the competitor attacks another on the
basis of strengths as well as weaknesses and does not leave any stone unturned to overthrow
the competition.
The current E-commerce scenario is the best example of the encirclement attack where the E-
commerce companies are ready to go negative in their margins to beat a competitor on
turnover basis. They want to come on top and gain maximum customers by hook or crook.
4) Bypass attack
What did iPod do to the Sony Walkman? It simply by passed it. There can be no simpler

example of the Bypass attack form of market challenger strategy. This type of strategy is
found in a firm which has the brains to innovate. And when it innovates, it bypasses the
complete competition and creates a segment of its own. Off course, other competitors soon
follow. But the attack is very useful in the long term to create brand reputation and gain
customers.
5) Guerrilla marketing
Making small but useful changes, which repeatedly puts your brand in the forefront, and
slowly but surely makes it a huge name in the market, is the crux of Guerrilla marketing. A
small brand, which wants to take on huge competitors, which first become famous in a local
market, then will introduce price discounts and trade discounts.
Slowly but surely, the name of the small player will spread and it will then
use branding activities and ATL and BTL marketing activities. Over a period of time, the
small player has become a successful large player and is a thorn in the side for all major
players in the market. Isn’t this the success of any small brand which became big?

Niche marketing strategies:
Niche marketing Strategies
Trusted-
Word-of- Targeted
Messenger/End
Mouth Collateral
orsement
Campaigns Campaigns
Campaigns
Niche marketing is a targeted marketing plan that focuses on one particular section of the
market that has high potential to connect with a product or service. Instead of casting a wide
net in mass-media and large-event marketing, niche marketing zeroes in on strategically
selected venues and media platforms that have high concentrations of these targeted
consumers.
Some of the niche marketing strategies are:
Word-of-Mouth Campaigns: These campaigns rely more on conversations among

consumers than advertising or marketing materials touting the product or service. Brand
exposure is low key and subtle, such as sponsorship or giveaways at events or establishments
frequented by the niche market. As a result, these campaigns take longer to develop and yield
results, but the returns can be extremely high, given that word-of-mouth recommendations
generally carry a lot of weight with consumers.
Trusted-Messenger/Endorsement Campaigns: This strategy hinges on finding a few key

influencers in the niche market and enlisting them as spokespersons on behalf of a product or
service. An example of this strategy would to hire Wilford Brimley (a long-time actor who is

known and loved by many senior citizens) as spokesperson for medical products used
frequently by the elderly. The success of these campaigns is highly contingent on the
credibility of the spokesperson and the sincerity with which the endorsement is delivered.
Targeted Collateral Campaigns: This strategy relies on consistent brand exposure to the
targeted Niche Market. Just about any radio station that plays a niche type of music
(alternative, country & western, or classical, for example) that appeals to a certain audience
will employ targeted collateral campaigns. They might distribute collateral and attend
concerts by artists played frequently on their station, or advertise in local music/entertainment
publications.
Niche marketing strategies require you to be consistent in your efforts. Helping your
customer is the most important factor in online marketing or in any type of marketing
anywhere because marketing is all about people. Marketing Consultant

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Marketing Management 1

Unit-I: Marketing and its Environment

Definition - Role of marketing - Concepts of marketing - Production concept - Product concept -

The American Marketing Association offers this managerial definition: “Marketing

1. Meets consumer needs and wants:

2. Ensures organization survival, growth and reputation:

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4. Adapting the right price:

5. Better product offerings:

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9. Discharge social responsibilities:

10. Economic growth:

They have been defined long time ago as this:

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The five marketing concepts

The five marketing concepts are:

Let’s take a closer look at each one.

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The production concept:

The product Concept:

This concept works on an assumption that customers prefer products of

The selling Concept

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The marketing Concept

The societal marketing Concept:

Relationship marketing Concepts:

Relationship marketing is a facet of customer relationship management (CRM) that focuses

Relationship marketing stands in contrast to the more traditional transactional

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Effective relationship marketing involves a variety of overlapping strategies and technologies

Importance of relationship marketing

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Implementing a relationship marketing strategy

Relationship marketing is based on the tenets of customer experience management (CEM),

Benefits of relationship marketing:

Higher customer lifetime value (CLV). Relationship marketing creates loyal customers,

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 Reduction in marketing and advertising spend. Spending on marketing and

 Stronger organizational alignment around the customer. Organizations that

Examples of relationship marketing

 Provide exceptional customer service, as customers who are consistently impressed

 Hold customer events to connect with customers and build a community.

 Create customer advocacy or brand advocacy programs to reward customers who

 Offer discounts or bonuses to long-time or repeat customers.

Major Tasks of Marketing for the Success in Marketing

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1. Develop marketing strategies and plans

 Determining the strategies consist of identifying the marketing objectives or goals of

 They assess and analyse strength and weakness, opportunities and threats (SWOT).

2. Creating marketing information system

3. Build customer relationship

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4. Build strong brands

5. Determine marketing mix

8. Create long-term growth

9. Implementation and control

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COMPONENTS OF MARKETING ENVIRONMENT

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THE INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

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THE EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

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MARKETING ENVIRONMENT ANALYSIS