PLANNING MARKETING: PARTNERING TO BUILD CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS- marketing 7

PLANNING MARKETING: PARTNERING TO BUILD CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS

Within each business unit, more detailed planning takes place. The major functional departments in each unit must work together to accomplish strategic objectives. Marketing provides a guiding philosophy—the marketing concept—that suggests that company strategy should revolve around building profitable relationships with important customer groups. Marketing provides inputs to strategic planners by helping to identify attractive market opportunities and by assessing the firm’s potential to take advantage of them. Marketing designs strategies for reaching the unit’s objectives.

Partnering with Other Company Departments
Each company department can be thought of as a link in the company’s value chain. A value chain is the series of departments that carry out value-creating activities to design, produce, market, deliver, and support the firm’s products. A company’s value chain is only as strong as its weakest link.Success depends on how well each department performs its work of adding customer value and on how well the activities of various departments are coordinated. In practice, departmental relations are full of conflicts and misunderstandings.
Partnering with Others in the Marketing System
The firm needs to look beyond its own value chain and into the value chains of its suppliers, distributors, and ultimately, customers. More companies today are partnering with other members of the supply chain to improve the performance of the customer value delivery network. Increasingly, today’s competition no longer takes place between individual competitors. Rather, it takes place between the entire value-delivery networks created by these competitors.

MARKETING STRATEGY AND THE MARKETING MIX
Marketing strategy is the marketing logic by which the company hopes to achieve these profitable relationships.
Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy
Companies know that they cannot profitably serve all consumers in a given market—at least not all consumers in the same way.
Market Segmentation
The process of dividing a market into distinct groups of buyers with different needs, characteristics, or behavior who might require separate products or marketing programs is called market segmentation. A market segment consists of consumers who respond in a similar way to a given set of marketing efforts.
Market Targeting
Market targeting involves evaluating each market segment’s attractiveness and selecting one or more segments to enter. A company should target segments in which it can profitably generate the greatest customer value and sustain it over time.
Market Differentiation and Positioning
A product’s position is the place the product occupies relative to competitors in consumers’ minds. Marketers want to develop unique market positions for their products. Market positioning is arranging for a product to occupy a clear, distinctive, and desirable place relative to competing products in the minds of target customers. Positioning establishes differentiation. To gain competitive advantage, the company must offer value to target consumers. This is accomplished through product differentiation—actually differentiating the company’s market offering so that it gives consumers more value.

Developing an Integrated Marketing Mix
The marketing mix is the set of tactical marketing tools that the firm blends to produce the response it wants in the target market. Product means the goods-and-services combination the company offers to the target market. Price is the amount of money customers must pay to obtain the product. Place includes company activities that make the product available to target consumers. Promotion means activities that communicate the merits of the product and persuade target customers to buy it. An effective marketing program blends all of the marketing mix elements into a coordinated program designed to achieve the company’s marketing objectives by delivering value to consumers. Some critics feel that the four Ps may omit or underemphasize certain important activities. From the buyer’s viewpoint, in this age of customer relationships, the four Ps might be better described as the four Cs:
1. Customer solution (Product)
2. Customer cost (Price)
3. Convenience (Place)
4. Communication (Promotion)

MANAGING THE MARKETING EFFORT

Managing the marketing process requires the four marketing management functions shown in Figure 2.6.
• Analysis
• Planning
• Implementation
• Control