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Marketing

Marketing - Concepts and Principles

In this section, marketing will be defined and explained, including segmentation of target consumers,
constructing product positioning, budgeting and measuring ROI, and how to leverage the "four P's" of
marketing to execute marketing plans.

Marketing Defined

Marketing, traditionally named as one of the core functions on the business side - the others being finance,
operations and human resources - of any enterprise, refers to the act of engaging target customers in an effort
to convince them to use a particular product or service. Key considerations in this effort include:

Research and analysis: the acquisition and usage of customer data, including end user, retailer, and distributor,
for example

Competitive intelligence: knowledge of a market's competitive forces

Awareness: the first phase of customer engagement, it measures the extent to which an end user is aware of a
product or service

Consideration: a phase that falls after awareness, indicating that a user is "considering" using a particular
product or service

Preference: the phase following consideration, it indicates that an end user prefers one particular product or
service over another

Purchase: the phase that usually counts the most, it indicates actual usage

Marketing seeks to increase purchase by affecting awareness, consideration and preference in the context of
competitive forces and detailed customer and market information.

Target User Segmentation

Though marketing involves a lot of creative work, the most important first step for any marketer is to first
understand the target user. This typically entails detailed analysis and is every bit as important as
understanding a product's most compelling feature or features. There are many methods for acquiring this
knowledge, including primary research (e.g. surveys), syndicated research, and focus groups. Once this data is
acquired, there are many ways to segment a population of potential consumers, the three most common
categories being demographic, psychographic and behavioral. Demographic data describes quantitative
attributes, such as age, gender, household income, and geographical location. It is not uncommon for
marketers to rely on census data to segment demographically. Pyschographic data usually describes end user
attitudes and affinities. For example, a generation of Americas are described as being "empty nesters" because
they have grown children who have moved away from home. This descriptor could suffice as a customer
segment. Behavioral data describes actual end user decisions, regardless of their belonging to any particular
demographic or psychographic group. Increasingly, behavioral targeting is becoming the more popular
segmentation model because of its emphasis on actions and not just attitudes (psychographics) or attributes
(demographics).

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Marketing

Product Positioning

Once a target user group or audience has been defined, the product's most compelling features for this target
must be understood. The most reliable way to achieve this is by product testing via focus group or survey.
While not an ironclad indicator of a product's likelihood of market success with a particular segment, it is
almost always a more reliable and more important gauge of interest compared to informal, often internal
discussions among a product's management, since rarely will that internal group feature a similar make-up as
the actual target audience.

Once a product's most important features are defined, the product positioning needs to be created. The
positioning should be a short and simple sentence, not necessarily written in consumer-friendly language, that
describes the product's benefit in terms that are germane to the user and offer a point of differentiation
compared to substitutes the customer could choose instead. While a product positioning is best when it is
concise, its impact on a product's marketing campaign should never be underestimated. A well written,
relevant and differentiated benefit expressed in a positioning statement can serve as a powerful foundation for
a marketing campaign.

Budgeting and Measuring ROI

As with any business expenditure, marketing expenses must be justified because of the opportunity cost they
present, i.e. how the company could have spent the money differently. Therefore, it is important that a
marketer demonstrate that an investment made in marketing will generate a satisfactory return.

Marketing return on investment (ROI) can be measured in several ways. The most typical and simplest metric
is a standard measure of profit earned divided by cost of a program. Therefore, if a marketing program
projects to earn $200,000 in profit over the life of the program and cost $50,000 to implement, the ROI would
be $200,000/$50,000, or 400%. A more sophisticated measure would account for the time value of money,
especially if return would be measured in a period of years. It's up to each individual company to determine its
own ROI hurdle rate in order to approve spending on a given marketing program.

Marketing budgeting needs to be treated with the same rigor as any other cost input, such as distribution or
R&D. A typical rule of thumb is that marketing costs should amount to approximately 7-10 percent of gross
sales, though that percentage can vary considerably, depending on the circumstances. For example, a new
product in a competitive marketplace may need to spend much more than 10 percent in order to gain a
sufficient level of market awareness. This reflects the higher cost of customer acquisition associated with new
products, compared to the cost of customer retention. Conversely, a mature product should need less
marketing spending since it typically has a loyal base of users.

The "Four P's" of Marketing

Once a marketing budget is determined, the marketing mix needs to be identified and funded. A marketing
mix is the portfolio of marketing programs a manager can fund to achieve his goals (e.g. sales, awareness,
etc.) Typically, funding can fall into one of four marketing categories, known as the "Four P's" of Marketing.
The Four P's traditionally are defined as follows:

- Product

- Price

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Marketing
- Promotion

- Place (another word for distribution)

Occasionally, marketers will speak of a fifth "P" - packaging. Investments in any of these four or five areas
can be shown to yield a return. For example, a marketer may choose to spend funds on a new product feature
that R&D can add to a product based on customer needs or a change in the competitive landscape. A marketer
can subsidize the price of a product in order to reduce its price to the end user, which should increase
consumption. Promotion typically involves advertising, public relations and contests, including events, and
are the most visible expressions of marketing. Finally, a marketer can invest in market development funds, or
MDF, to help a distributor promote a product through that distributor's channels. Investments in the "Four P's"
should consider the target user, as well as the time needed for completion, the competition, and the
opportunity cost associated with investing in some programs and not in others. The best marketing programs
are integrated, meaning that they share the same positioning and core messaging, and link to one another. For
example, a marketer could construct an online advertisement that links to a distributor's site and offers a
discount to select users, with each step of the communication sharing a common creative theme.

Invariably, a marketing campaign will feature more than one program. It is not uncommon for marketers to
debate marketing breadth versus marketing depth. Some marketers will seek to engage in multiple marketing
vehicles, sacrificing depth in each for exposure in many, while others prefer to fund only a small number of
channels but do so more thoroughly. Like many things in marketing, this one has no right or wrong answer
and is up to the marketer to decide.

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