Mantras of marketing

Explain the concept marketing management. Discuss the nature and objectives of marketing management. Ans. Marketing management is a business discipline which is focused on the practical application of marketing techniques and the management of a firm’s marketing resources and activities. Marketing Management focuses on strategic marketing issues that marketing managers face every day. Rapidly emerging forces of globalization have led firms to market beyond the borders of their home countries, making international marketing highly significant and an integral part of a firm’s marketing strategy.

Marketing managers are often responsible for influencing the level, timing, and composition of customer demand accepted definition of the term. In part, this is because the role of a marketing manager can vary significantly based on a business’s size, corporate culture, and industry context. To create an effective, cost-efficient marketing management strategy, firms must possess a detailed, objective understanding of their own business and the market in which they operate. In analyzing these issues, the discipline of marketing management often overlaps with the related discipline of strategic planning.

Marketing management employs various tools from economics and competitive strategy to analyze the industry context in which the firm operates. These include Porter’s five forces, analysis of strategic groups of competitors, value chain analysis and others. In competitor analysis, marketers build detailed profiles of each competitor in the market, focusing especially on their relative competitive strengths and weaknesses using SWOT analysis. Marketing management often finds it necessary to invest in research to collect the data required to perform accurate marketing analysis.

As such, they often conduct market research to obtain this information. Marketers employ a variety of techniques to conduct market research, but some of the more common include:

* Qualitative marketing research, such as focus groups and various types of interviews.

* Quantitative marketing research, such as statistical surveys.

* Experimental techniques such as test markets.

* Observational techniques such as ethnographic (on-site) observation Nature of Marketing Management.

* It Combines the Fields of Marketing and Management.

As the name implies, marketing management combines the fields of marketing and management. Marketing consists of discovering consumer needs and wants, creating the goods and services that meet those needs and wants; and pricing, promoting, and delivering those goods and services. Management is getting things done through other people. Managers engage in five key activities – planning, organising, staffing, directing, and controlling. Marketing management implies the integration of these concepts.  Marketing Management is a Business Process.

Marketing management is a business process, to manage marketing activities in profit seeking and non-profit organisations at different levels of management, i. e. supervisory, middle-management, and executive levels. Marketing management decisions are based on strong knowledge of marketing functions and clear understanding and application of supervisory and managerial techniques.

* Marketing Management is Both Science and Art “ Marketing management is an art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping and growing customers through creating, delivering and communicating superior customer value. Objectives of Marketing Management  Corporate growth. Companies need to grow, but it must be profitable growth. Too many companies go on acquisition binges or geographical expansions only to grow their top lines at a terrible cost to their bottom lines. They are buying growth rather than earning it.

* Market share. Too many companies aim to collect as many customers as possible. But more market share often means picking up more unreliable customers. These companies would be smarter to focus on nurturing loyal customers, getting to know them better, and ? ding more goods and services they may need or want. * Return on sales. Some companies focus on achieving or maintaining a certain margin. But the margin is meaningless without matching it to the sales volume generated per dollar of assets (asset turnover). * Earnings per share growth. Companies set targets for their earnings per share (EPS). But EPS does not necessarily reflect the return on capital because companies can raise EPS by buying back shares, writing off certain costs, and employing various creative accounting measures.

* Reputation. Companies should strive for a good reputation. A company’s main reputational goals should be fourfold: to be (1) the supplier of choice to customers, (2) the employer of choice to employees, (3) the partner of choice to distributors, and (4) the company of choice to investors. Its reputational capital will contribute to its primary goal, earning a higher return than the cost of capital. 3. What is pricing? Discuss its role and objectives in marketing of product. Ans. Pricing is the process of determining what a company will receive in exchange for its products. Pricing factors are manufacturing cost, market place, competition, market condition, and quality of product.

Pricing is also a key variable in microeconomic price allocation theory. Pricing is a fundamental aspect of financial modeling and is one of the four Ps of the marketing mix. The other three aspects are product, promotion, and place. Price is the only revenue generating element amongst the four Ps, the rest being cost centers. Pricing is the manual or automatic process of applying prices to purchase and sales orders, based on factors such as: a fixed amount, quantity break, promotion or sales campaign, specific vendor quote, price prevailing on entry, shipment or invoice date, combination of multiple orders or lines, and many others.

The needs of the consumer can be converted into demand only if the consumer has the willingness and capacity to buy the product. Thus pricing is very important in marketing. It usually depends on the firm’s average costs, and on the customer’s perceived value of the product in comparison to his or her perceived value of the competing products.