Hi and welcome to the first session of the programme.

Today we will take you through a session

where you will learn the basics of marketing. Say you have a long weekend ahead, and you come
across a pair of posts on Facebook where a friend of yours is interested in a concert taking place
outside the city. At the same time, you also notice my trip promoting its travel packages as a partner
for the same event. Well, you end up booking a ticket for the concert and you end up making all your
hotel and travel arrangements through making my trip. This is marketing, see how on a regular basis
you're subconsciously interacting with the world of marketing. From a toothpaste to a mobile phone
from clothes, food, travel, cards, everything purchased by you is in some way captured. You know, it's
somebody driven by the way businesses and brands capture your thoughts and present their
offerings to you. In today's session, you will be going through the basics of marketing and how brands
think. So let's dive straight into it.

Apple is one of the richest companies in the world. Its market capitalization is greater than the GDP
of many countries. This should come as no surprise at all. But how did Apple achieve such

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dominance? its products are amongst the most expensive in their respective categories. And yet,
Apple keeps gaining more customers by the day. And most Apple users typically own more than one
type of Apple product. How did Apple manage to achieve such a high level of brand loyalty? What is it
done right that many others just haven't been able to do. Apple success can be attributed to its focus
on innovative and unique products, superb consumer experience and seamless synching between
devices. Another major reason is it's brilliant and focused marketing plans.

In the morning, when the newspaper tempts you with a soft drink, or when you're driving to work,
and you hear about a discount sale on the radio, or while in a meeting, you receive a call from a bank
offering you alone. All these forms of marketing. Often, marketing, selling and advertising are used
interchangeably. But there is a significant difference between each of these terms. Marketing is a
much broader term, while advertising and selling are actually some functions that come under it.
Marketing deals with everything from identifying human and social needs to meeting them. The
American Marketing Association defines marketing as the activity set of institutions and processes
for creating, communicating and delivering offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners,
and society at large.

If you look at this definition closely, there are three key activities involved in marketing. First, there's
creating offerings. This is the process of working with others, to develop offerings that have value for
customers, then that's communicating. This is the process of describing your offerings to customers,
as well as learning from them about their needs and preferences. And finally, delivering this is the
process of providing your offerings to customers in ways that enhance value.

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I think I've always believed that marketing has two fundamental roles in any business. One is to
create demand for your products. And that, specifically is to get more people to choose your
products over competition. So I think I think, whether you do communication, whether it's
positioning and all the other sub disciplines of marketing, I think kind of aligned to how you create
demand faster than your competition for your own products. So that's one core reason for the
existence of marketing.

But the other reason for marketing in any organisation today is to create value, which is, you know,
you're spending 100 rupees to make a product. How do you get your consumers to see value, which
is worth 200 or 300 rupees, because that's what generates profits. And that's where a lot of things
like brand equity and a lot of things like all the other stuff that we do, is kind of geared towards
creating value, which is significantly more than the cost of the product. Because otherwise it
becomes a bit like a commodity, right? I mean, the whole point about branding and marketing is not
just that more people should want my product over competition, but also they should be willing to
pay a lot more than what I'm paying to use my goods or services. So that's those are the fundamental
two reasons why I think marketing exists.
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So the biggest skill gap I see in the current breed of digital marketers is they completely lack business
understanding, what they should understand is digital as a way to achieve an objective. The objective
being business goals, it could be customer satisfaction, it could be increase in sales, it could be
gaining market share. I would strongly recommend upcoming digital marketers to understand the
industry context in which they are operating. They could be working in an insurance firm or a travel
firm or it firm. First step is actually understanding the business.

So the biggest skill gap I see in the current breed of digital marketers is they completely lack business
understanding, what they should understand is digital as a way to achieve an objective. The objective
being business goals, it could be customer satisfaction, it could be increase in sales, it could be
gaining market share. I would strongly recommend upcoming digital marketers to understand the
industry context in which they are operating. They could be working in an insurance firm or a travel
firm or it firm. First step is actually understanding the business.

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Let's try and understand the scope and importance of marketing. One of the most commonly
marketed categories is that of goods and services. When you see a L'Oreal ad, it's typically marketing
a product, say a shampoo. And when you come across the brochure of a car rental firm, the company
is typically marketing its services, the convenience of renting a car. Another widely marketed
category is events and experiences. An event could be a global sporting meet, like the Olympics or a
cricket tournament. And experience on the other hand, could be time spent at a theme park like
Disney World, or an adventure sports arena that offers skydiving activities. Increasingly, we also see
the marketing of people, organisations and places. All these categories need to be marketed actively
to build a distinct image in the minds of the target market. An actor like Shahrukh Khan, an
organisation like IBM, a place like Kerala, only to be consistently promoted and marketed, whether to
build and grow a fan base, or create an attractive image as a place to work or to cultivate a steady
stream of visitors. It is also common now to see how ideas and benefits are being marketed.
promoting awareness about AIDS. Encouraging family planning, and discouraging smoking are some
ideas that need to be promoted to improve health and social wellbeing.

Let's now turn to why marketing is so important for a company, or indeed any organisation. Without
customers an organisation really has no purpose. Marketing starts with researching and
understanding consumers. Its role is to help the company understand the needs and wants of its
customers.

Its role is to help the company understand the needs and wants of its customers. Let's take the
example of Apple to understand how marketing was vital to its success. Steve Jobs understood
deeply that what customers wanted was a great user experience. So he focused on delivering this
relentlessly with Apple products from the Mac to the iPod to the iPhone and iPad. If a company is
introducing a product into a market for the first time, then it needs to make consumers in the market
aware of that product.

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Marketing helps create awareness for products and services. Each time Apple introduced a new
product, Steve Jobs would hold a high profile press conference to bring that product to the world.
These were eagerly awaited events, and they received huge publicity making the new product
instantly known to millions of people around the world. Once a company has created awareness for
its product, it needs to make this product available to consumers, ideally in a place near them.
Marketing ensures that products are distributed and conveniently available to consumers. Apple did
this by opening its own chain of stores. placed in attractive locations in major cities around the world.
It was able to attract large numbers of customers who then drove the sales and awareness of Apple
products. Marketing also helps establish the reputation and brand image of a company and its
products.

Many people wait for Apple to launch new products, because they know that these will not only meet
their expectations, but even exceed them. They remember how excited and delighted they were
when the previous Apple product came out. A major aim of marketing is to maintain a long term and
healthy relationship with its customers. Apple does this through its great products. It's superb
communication with customers. It's beautiful stores, excellent customer service and its strong brand.
The relationship between Apple and its customers keeps strengthening with every new Apple
product that it releases into the market. From the customer's perspective, marketing helps them
become aware of the products and services available in the marketplace. It helps them to get detailed
information about various aspects of the product or service such as its price, its features, its
availability, etc. And this in turn helps them to evaluate the various alternatives available and make
good decisions when purchasing products and services to meet their basic and higher order needs.

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The second skill gap, which I see is that most digital marketers today don't understand marketing
technology. If you don't understand marketing technology and you only are a specialist in search
engine optimization, or social media, you really won't understand concepts like a single view of the
customer. And your campaigns won't be able to use a lot of interesting technology elements which
are in play today.

The third skill gap, which I actually see in digital marketers is, they like to think of themselves as
digital marketers forgetting that the second part of digital marketing is marketing. If you don't
understand the basic concepts of marketing, like market research consumer behaviour, you're really
not going to be a successful digital marketer. The ultimate aim of marketing is to ensure an exchange
of goods and services between producers and consumers in a way that maximises satisfaction to
consumers and leads to better recommendations, repeats and reviews. To achieve this aim, there are
many marketing functions involved. The first function is market research. Market research focuses
on gathering and analysing information pertaining to customers. Who are the people we want to sell
to? What are their needs and preferences? Where do they shop? And how much are they willing to
pay? Why would they want to buy from us as opposed to a rival business?
answering these questions requires you to do extensive on the ground research on consumers,
prevailing market trends and competing products.

McDonald's, for instance, routinely conducts market research to identify the needs of different
categories of customers it caters to.Based on this research, it knows that parents go to McDonald's
with their children, because this makes their children happy. Children go to McDonald's because it's
a fun place to eat. Professionals visit McDonald's because of its quick service, and teenagers prefer

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McDonald's because of its affordable menu. These needs, habits and behaviour of the different
categories of customers have been understood well by McDonald's through market research.
Market planning is another important marketing function. It refers to developing marketing
strategies on the basis of information gathered to meet the company's objectives. It also includes
planning of who will do what, when and how.
Before entering the Indian market, McDonald's planned its products and services based on the
preferences of the Indian consumer market. It reworked its menu because it could not serve beef or
pork products in India. For the large vegetarian population, it added several vegetarian options to
suit local tastes. McDonald's kept immunising its menu, and its marketing campaigns. This market
planning helped McDonald's enter and grow in the Indian market effectively. Today, McDonald's has
a loyal customer base in India. In spite of that being several other options like Burger King, and KFC
in the market.

Another marketing function is branding. Branding is the process of creating a unique name and image
for a product in the mind of consumers. It takes a generic commodity and makes it into a recognisable
and desirable brand name. Again, pick McDonald's. The company has branded itself so well, that is
recalled every time a child passes the Golden Arches or sees Ronald cloud. Children link these
associations with McDonald's, and no other brand. children develop an emotional bond with
McDonald's that's difficult to break even when they grow up. A fourth marketing function is
promotion. Promotion involves informing a customer about the company's product and encouraging
them to buy. Promotion helps in attracting new customers and keeping existing customers coming
back.There have been several McDonald's ad campaigns and slogans over the years. McDonald's
promotes its brand through several media such as TV, print, radio, billboards, online offers discount
coupons, and so on.Use of the tagline I'm loving is a key part of its promotional activities.

Customer Support Service is yet another important marketing function. Once the product has been
promoted and sold, the company needs to provide continuous support to customers and have some
mechanism to collect their feedback. Customer feedback is crucial to the ability of firms to evaluate
their products and continually improve them.
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employees and McDonald's are trained and equipped with adequate resources to handle complaints
effectively. every customer contact, be it on the internet, the phone or through a letter is captured on
a customer services database. McDonald's is able to ensure that each and every customer receives
an accurate personal and timely response to any issue the customer may raise with the company.

So we've already looked at the different functions of marketing using McDonald's as an example.
Now let's look at Domino's, another fast food brand that most of us are aware of. And we'll look at
how they launched the burger pizza.

First, let's look at the results of a market research that they conducted, which actually led to them
deciding that a burger pizza is a need that they could cater to. Therefore, in their market research,
one of the things that they looked at or looked at was the consumption pattern of their pizzas, they
noticed that they were consumed mainly during lunch and dinner hours. And the second finding that
they got was that they were actually being consumed in groups and not as an individual person
individual consumption item. Therefore, in order to cater to this individual customer who comes
during snack times, they thought what is the product that they should come out with, and the
findings led them to actually conceive the sandwich, a sandwich or a burger. So when actually they
came out with these market insights, one of the things that they realised was that they needed to

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come out with a product that would actually cater to snack timings off dinner, and have lunch hours.
And that's how they conceived the burger pizza.

Now let's look at how they actually went about planning to launch this product into the market. So
market planning is the concept that I'm talking about as you saw previously, it's nothing but a
marketing strategy that is created to meet a company's objective based on information that's
gathered in market research. And with the market research information and insights that they have,
they came up with the burger pizza, which addressed the two findings jointly. The idea of this burger
pizza was to essentially dominate the individual consumption market, a place dominated by brands.
Essentially, there are competitors now, that is McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, and a lot of other local
players. But as a part of its market planning, Domino's also had to make sure it stayed true to its key
brand essence of making delicious pizzas, which are essentially filled with mozzarella and extremely
delectable to eat as the product and the taste of pizza for the look of a burger.

This can also be seen in the Domino's branding for the burger pizza, right? So when they actually
came up with the brand, and they thought of the positioning of the burger pizza, the tagline that they
came up with, over a period of time was, was to essentially build a unique image of that product into
the minds of a consumer. And obviously bringing out the fact that it's an ever evolving and an
innovative brand. So for this, as a consumer, you might know that Domino's always comes up with
these different menu items, different types of bases, that is cheese burst, or double cheese crunch
pizza. Therefore the branding of the burger pizza was to essentially bring out the brand essence of
Domino's that makes mozzarella pizzas and also brings out the fact that it's entering a new market.
And hence the timeline looks like a burger and tastes like a pizza was finalised, which facilitates the
brand image by explicitly communicating that even though that it looks like a pizza, it ultimately
looks like a burger. It ultimately tastes like a Domino's Pizza. Finally, let's look at the promotional
channels used by Domino's to generate awareness about this product and launch it into the market

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right. dominance over pizza was promoted on TV commercials in print ads in newspapers such as
Hindustan Times and The Times of India a lot of sales promotion was done on their existing outlets.
holdings in outdoor media were also done in order to create awareness to connect with the digital
audience. social media channels such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are also used. And
interactive engagement methods are used to engage with the consumers there.

Identifying the problem statement

This section has three parts:

● Category/Company
● Competition
● Brand task

Category/Company

- How much has the category grown over the years?

- How much is your brand growth within the category?

- How many players operate in this category?

- What is your market share?

- How is the category expected to change in the short and long term?

Brand Task

Here are some of the key questions that you can ask about your brand:

● How many people are aware of your brand? What are their awareness levels?

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 ● If the awareness levels are high, are people willing to consider your brand? If not, what is the
reason for that?
● If the awareness and consideration levels are high, is it translating into adoption or trials or
sales?
● If it is not delivering sales, what could be the reasons for that?
● If the sales are good, do you have repeat purchases? If not, how can you create loyalists?

I'm sure this session leaves you wondering whether the last product you purchased was actually
something you needed? Or was it the power of marketing that made you purchase it? To recap, we
covered three essential areas in the basics of marketing. In the first session, you were introduced to
marketing and through the example of Apple understood how marketing has been able to create
value for its customers across various domains like superior user experience and excellent customer
service. You also got an understanding of the scope and importance of marketing.

In the first session, you were introduced to marketing and through the example of Apple understood
how marketing has been able to create value for its customers across various domains like superior
user experience and excellent customer service. You also got an understanding of the scope and
importance of marketing. And again, using Apple's example, you saw how the brand defined its
purpose, how it created awareness and supported product distribution to deliver products with
seamless experience, and thus satisfy the basic and higher needs of consumers. Next, you deep dive
into the five function key functions of marketing. Using McDonald's as an example, you saw how, you

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know by conducting a thorough market research, McDonald's was able to gain insights into the
characteristics of their various potential customers. He also understood how McDonald's through
the use of market planning was able to cater to the Indian population by reworking its menu and in
the process gaining brand recognition. Finally, you learn to promote that promotion and customer
service are also very important functions of marketing with respect to acquiring new and retaining
existing customers, as evidenced by you know McDonald's strong foothold in the Indian food food
market. In our next session, you will learn about market segmentation, target marketing strategies,
and how to position your product in the market. Stay tuned.

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