Marketing management
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Marketing management is the organizational discipline which focuses on the practical application of
marketing Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...
orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and organizations and on the management of a firm's marketing resources and activities.


Structure

Marketing management employs tools from
economics Economics () is the social science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and intera ...
and competitive strategy to analyze the industry context in which the firm operates. These include
Porter's five forces Porter's Five Forces Framework is a method of analysing the operating environment of a competition of a business. It draws from industrial organization (IO) economics to derive five forces that determine the competitive intensity and, therefore, ...
, analysis of strategic groups of competitors,
value chain A value chain is a progression of activities that a firm operating in a specific industry performs in order to deliver a valuable product (i.e., good and/or service) to the end customer. The concept comes through business management and was firs ...
analysis and others. In competitor analysis, marketers build detailed profiles of each competitor in the market, focusing on their relative competitive strengths and weaknesses using
SWOT analysis SWOT analysis (or SWOT matrix) is a strategic planning and strategic management technique used to help a person or organization identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats related to business competition or project planning. It ...
. Marketing managers will examine each competitor's cost structure, sources of profits, resources and competencies, competitive positioning and
product differentiation In economics and marketing, product differentiation (or simply differentiation) is the process of distinguishing a product or service from others to make it more attractive to a particular target market. This involves differentiating it from com ...
, degree of
vertical integration In microeconomics, management and international political economy, vertical integration is a term that describes the arrangement in which the supply chain of a company is integrated and owned by that company. Usually each member of the suppl ...
, historical responses to industry developments, and other factors. Marketing management often conduct
market research Market research is an organized effort to gather information about target markets and customers: know about them, starting with who they are. It is an important component of business strategy and a major factor in maintaining competitiveness. Mark ...
and
marketing research Marketing research is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about issues relating to marketing products and services. The goal is to identify and assess how changing elements of the marketing mix i ...
to perform marketing analysis. Marketers employ a variety of techniques to conduct market research, but some of the more common include: *
Qualitative marketing research Qualitative marketing research involves a natural or observational examination of the philosophies that govern consumer behavior. The direction and framework of the research is often revised as new information is gained, allowing the researcher to ...
, such as
focus groups A focus group is a group interview involving a small number of demographically similar people or participants who have other common traits/experiences. Their reactions to specific researcher/evaluator-posed questions are studied. Focus groups are ...
and various types of interviews *
Quantitative marketing research Quantitative marketing research is the application of quantitative research techniques to the field of marketing research. It has roots in both the positivist view of the world, and the modern marketing viewpoint that marketing is an interactive ...
, such as
statistical survey Survey methodology is "the study of survey methods". As a field of applied statistics concentrating on human-research surveys, survey methodology studies the sampling of individual units from a population and associated techniques of survey da ...
s *
Experimental techniques The design of experiments (DOE, DOX, or experimental design) is the design of any task that aims to describe and explain the variation of information under conditions that are hypothesized to reflect the variation. The term is generally associ ...
such as
test market A test market, in the field of business and marketing, is a geographic region or demographic group used to gauge the viability of a product or service in the mass market prior to a wide scale roll-out. The criteria used to judge the acceptabilit ...
s *
Observational techniques In marketing and the social sciences, observational research (or field research) is a social research technique that involves the direct observation of phenomena in their natural setting. This differentiates it from experimental research in which a ...
such as
ethnographic Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject o ...
(on-site) observation Marketing managers may also design and oversee various
environmental scanning Market environment and business environment are marketing terms that refer to factors and forces that affect a firm's ability to build and maintain successful customer relationships. The business environment has been defined as "the totality of ph ...
and
competitive intelligence Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process and forward-looking practices used in producing knowledge about the competitive environment to improve organizational performance. It involves the systematic collection and analysis of information from ...
processes to help identify trends and inform the company's marketing analysis.


Brand audit

A
brand A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create an ...
audit An audit is an "independent examination of financial information of any entity, whether profit oriented or not, irrespective of its size or legal form when such an examination is conducted with a view to express an opinion thereon.” Auditing ...
is a thorough examination of a brand's current position in an industry compared to its competitors and the examination of its effectiveness. When it comes to brand auditing, six questions should be carefully examined and assessed: #How well the business's current brand strategy is working #What the company's established resource strengths and weaknesses are #What its external opportunities and threats are #How competitive the business's prices and costs are #How strong the business's competitive position in comparison to its competitors is #What strategic issues are facing the business When a business is conducting a brand audit, the
goal A goal is an idea of the future or desired result that a person or a group of people envision, plan and commit to achieve. People endeavour to reach goals within a finite time by setting deadlines. A goal is roughly similar to a purpose or ai ...
is to uncover the business's resource strengths, deficiencies, best market opportunities, outside threats, future profitability, and its competitive standing in comparison to existing competitors. A brand audit establishes the strategic elements needed to improve brand position and competitive capabilities within the industry. Once a brand is audited, any business that ends up with a strong financial performance and market position is more likely than not to have a properly conceived and effectively executed brand strategy. A brand audit examines whether a business's share of the market is increasing, decreasing, or stable. It determines if the company's margin of profit is improving, or decreasing, and how much it is in comparison to the
profit margin Profit margin is a measure of profitability. It is calculated by finding the profit as a percentage of the revenue. \text = = There are 3 types of profit margins: gross profit margin, operating profit margin and net profit margin. * Gross Prof ...
of established competitors. Additionally, a brand audit investigates trends in a business's net profits, the return on existing investments, and its established economic value. It determines whether or not the business's entire financial strength and credit rating are improving or getting worse. This kind of audit also assesses a business's image and reputation with its customers. Furthermore, a brand audit seeks to determine whether or not a business is
perceived Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...
as an industry leader in technology, offering product or service innovations, along with exceptional customer service, among other relevant issues that customers use to decide on a brand of performance. A brand audit usually focuses on a business's strengths and resource capabilities because these are the elements that enhance its competitiveness. A business's competitive strengths can exist in several forms. Some of these forms include skilled or pertinent expertise, valuable physical assets, valuable human assets, valuable organizational assets, valuable intangible assets, competitive capabilities, achievements and attributes that position the business into a competitive advantage, and alliances or cooperative ventures. The basic concept of a brand audit is to determine whether a business's resource strengths are competitive assets or competitive liabilities. This type of audit seeks to ensure that a business maintains a distinctive competence that allows it to build and reinforce its competitive advantage. What's more, a successful brand audit seeks to establish what a business capitalizes on best, its level of expertise, resource strengths, and strongest competitive capabilities, while aiming to identify a business's position and future performance.


Marketing strategy

Two customer segments are often selected as targets because they score highly on two dimensions: # The segment is attractive to serve because it is large, growing, makes frequent purchases, is not price sensitive (i.e. is willing to pay high prices), or other factors; and # The company has the resources and capabilities to compete for the segment's business, can meet their needs better than the competition, and can do so profitably. A commonly cited definition of marketing is simply "meeting needs profitably". The implication of selecting target segments is that the business will subsequently allocate more resources to acquire and retain customers in the target segments than it will for other, non-targeted customers. In some cases, the firm may go so far as to turn away customers who are not in its target segment. The doorman at a swanky nightclub, for example, may deny entry to unfashionably dressed individuals because the business has made a strategic decision to target the "high fashion" segment of nightclub patrons. In conjunction with targeting decisions, marketing managers will identify the desired positioning they want the company, product, or brand to occupy in the target customer's mind. This positioning is often an encapsulation of a key benefit the company's product or service offers that is differentiated and superior to the benefits offered by competitive products. For example,
Volvo The Volvo Group ( sv, Volvokoncernen; legally Aktiebolaget Volvo, shortened to AB Volvo, stylized as VOLVO) is a Swedish multinational manufacturing corporation headquartered in Gothenburg. While its core activity is the production, distributio ...
has traditionally positioned its products in the
automobile A car or automobile is a motor vehicle with Wheel, wheels. Most definitions of ''cars'' say that they run primarily on roads, Car seat, seat one to eight people, have four wheels, and mainly transport private transport#Personal transport, pe ...
market in North America in order to be perceived as the leader in "safety", whereas BMW has traditionally positioned its brand to be perceived as the leader in "performance". Ideally, a firm's positioning can be maintained over a long period of time because the company possesses or can develop, some form of sustainable competitive advantage. The positioning should also be sufficiently relevant to the target segment such that it will drive the purchasing behavior of target customers. To sum up, the marketing branch of a company is to deal with the selling and popularity of its products among people and its customers, as the central and eventual goal of a company is customer satisfaction and the return of revenue.


Implementation planning

If the company has obtained an adequate understanding of the customer base and its own competitive position in the industry, marketing managers are able to make their own key strategic decisions and develop a
marketing strategy Marketing strategy allows organizations to focus limited resources on best opportunities to increase sales and achieve a competitive advantage in the market. Strategic marketing emerged in the 1970s/80s as a distinct field of study, further build ...
designed to maximize the
revenue In accounting, revenue is the total amount of income generated by the sale of goods and services related to the primary operations of the business. Commercial revenue may also be referred to as sales or as turnover. Some companies receive reven ...
s and profits of the firm. The selected strategy may aim for any of a variety of specific objectives, including optimizing short-term unit margins, revenue growth,
market share Market share is the percentage of the total revenue or sales in a market that a company's business makes up. For example, if there are 50,000 units sold per year in a given industry, a company whose sales were 5,000 of those units would have a ...
, long-term profitability, or other goals. After the firm's strategic objectives have been identified, the target market selected, and the desired positioning for the company, product, or brand has been determined, marketing managers focus on how to best implement the chosen strategy. Traditionally, this has involved implementation planning across the "4 Ps":
product management Product management is the business process of planning, developing, launching, and managing a product or service. It includes the entire lifecycle of a product, from ideation to development to go to market. Product managers are responsible for ...
, pricing (at what price slot does a producer position a product, e.g. low, medium, or high price), place (the place or area where the products are going to be sold, which could be local, regional, countrywide or international) (i.e. sales and
distribution Distribution may refer to: Mathematics *Distribution (mathematics), generalized functions used to formulate solutions of partial differential equations * Probability distribution, the probability of a particular value or value range of a vari ...
channels), and promotion. Taken together, the company's implementation choices across the 4 P's are often described as the
marketing mix The term "marketing mix" is a foundation model for businesses, historically centered around product, price, place, and promotion (also known as the "4 Ps"). The marketing mix has been defined as the "set of marketing tools that the firm uses to ...
, meaning the mix of elements the business will employ to "
go to market Go-to-market or go-to-market strategy is the plan of an organization, utilizing their outside resources (e.g. sales force and distributors), to deliver their unique value proposition to customers and achieve competitive advantage. The end goal is ...
" and execute the marketing strategy. The overall goal for the marketing mix is to consistently deliver a compelling
value proposition In marketing, a company’s value proposition is the full mix of benefits or economic value which it promises to deliver to the current and future customers (i.e., a market segment) who will buy their products and/or services. It is part of a co ...
that reinforces the firm's chosen positioning, builds customer loyalty and
brand equity Brand equity, in marketing, is the worth of a brand in and of itself – i.e., the social value of a well-known brand name. The owner of a well-known brand name can generate more revenue simply from brand recognition, as consumers perceive the prod ...
among target customers, and achieves the firm's marketing and financial objectives. In many cases, marketing management will develop a
marketing plan A marketing plan may be part of an overall business plan. Solid marketing strategy is the foundation of a well-written marketing plan so that goals may be achieved. While a marketing plan contains a list of actions, without a sound strategic founda ...
to specify how the company will execute the chosen strategy and achieve the business's objectives. The content of marketing plans varies for each firm, but commonly includes: * An executive summary * Situation analysis to summarize facts and insights gained from market research and marketing analysis * The company's mission statement or long-term strategic vision * A statement of the company's key objectives often subdivided into marketing objectives and financial objectives * The marketing strategy the business has chosen, specifying the target segments to be pursued and the competitive positioning to be achieved * Implementation choices for each element of the marketing mix (the 4 Ps)


Project, process, and vendor management

More broadly, marketing managers work to design and improve the effectiveness of core marketing processes, such as
new product development In business and engineering, new product development (NPD) covers the complete process of bringing a new product (business), product to market, renewing an existing product or introducing a product in a new market. A central aspect of NPD is prod ...
,
brand management In marketing, brand management begins with an analysis on how a brand is currently perceived in the market, proceeds to planning how the brand should be perceived if it is to achieve its objectives and continues with ensuring that the brand is pe ...
, marketing communications, and pricing. Marketers may employ the tools of
business process re-engineering Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aims to help organizations fundam ...
to ensure these processes are properly designed, and use a variety of process management techniques to keep them operating smoothly. Effective execution may require management of both internal resources and a variety of external vendors and service providers, such as the firm's
advertising agency An advertising agency, often referred to as a creative agency or an ad agency, is a business dedicated to creating, planning, and handling advertising and sometimes other forms of promotion and marketing for its clients. An ad agency is generally ...
. Marketers may therefore coordinate with the company's Purchasing department on the procurement of these services. Under the area of marketing agency management (i.e. working with external marketing agencies and suppliers) are techniques such as agency performance evaluation, scope of work, incentive compensation,
ERFx {{Unreferenced, date=May 2009 In procurement technology, ERFx (or eRFx) is an acronym for electronic request for '', where ''x'' can be Proposal (RFP), Quotation (RFQ), Information (RFI) or Tender (RFT). Other pseudonymous acronyms include ITT ...
's and storage of agency information in a supplier
database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...
.


Reporting, measurement, feedback and control systems

Marketing management employs a variety of metrics to measure progress against objectives. It is the responsibility of marketing managers to ensure that the execution of marketing programs achieves the desired objectives and does so in a cost-efficient manner. Marketing management therefore often makes use of various organizational control systems, such as sales forecasts, and sales force and reseller
incentive In general, incentives are anything that persuade a person to alter their behaviour. It is emphasised that incentives matter by the basic law of economists and the laws of behaviour, which state that higher incentives amount to greater levels of ...
programs,
sales force management system Salesforce management systems (also ''sales force automation systems'' (SFA)) are information systems used in customer relationship management (CRM) marketing and management that help automate some sales and sales force management functions. The ...
s, and
customer relationship management Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information. CRM systems compile data from a ra ...
tools (CRM). Some software vendors have begun using the term ''
customer data platform A customer data platform (CDP) is a collection of software which creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned and combined to create a single customer profile. ...
'' or ''marketing resource management'' to describe systems that facilitate an integrated approach for controlling marketing resources. In some cases, these efforts may be linked to various
supply chain management In commerce, supply chain management (SCM) is the management of the flow of goods and services including all processes that transform raw materials into final products between businesses and locations. This can include the movement and stor ...
systems, such as
enterprise resource planning Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the integrated management of main business processes, often in real time and mediated by software and technology. ERP is usually referred to as a category of Business management tools, business management ...
(ERP),
material requirements planning Material requirements planning (MRP) is a production planning, scheduling, and inventory control system used to manage manufacturing processes. Most MRP systems are software-based, but it is possible to conduct MRP by hand as well. An MRP system ...
(MRP),
efficient consumer response {{Notability, date=July 2022 Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) is a joint trade and industry body working towards making the grocery sector as a whole more responsive to consumer demand and promote the removal of unnecessary costs from the supply ...
(ECR), and
inventory management Field inventory management commonly known as inventory management is the function of understanding the stock mix of a company and the different demands on that stock. The demands are influenced by both external and internal factors and are balan ...
systems.


International marketing management

Globalization Globalization, or globalisation (Commonwealth English; see spelling differences), is the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide. The term ''globalization'' first appeared in the early 20t ...
has led some firms to market beyond the borders of their home countries, making
international marketing Global marketing is defined as “marketing on a worldwide scale reconciling or taking global operational differences, similarities and opportunities in order to reach global objectives". Global marketing is also a field of study in general busin ...
a part of those firms' marketing strategy. Marketing managers are often responsible for influencing the level, timing, and composition of customer demand. In part, this is because the role of a marketing manager (or sometimes called managing marketer in small- and medium-sized enterprises) can vary significantly based on a business's size,
corporate culture Historically there have been differences among investigators regarding the definition of organizational culture. Edgar Schein, a leading researcher in this field, defined "organizational culture" as comprising a number of features, including a s ...
, and
industry Industry may refer to: Economics * Industry (economics), a generally categorized branch of economic activity * Industry (manufacturing), a specific branch of economic activity, typically in factories with machinery * The wider industrial sector ...
context. For example, in a small- and medium-sized enterprises, the managing marketer may contribute in both managerial and marketing operations roles for the company brands. In a large consumer products company, the marketing manager may act as the overall
general manager A general manager (GM) is an executive who has overall responsibility for managing both the revenue and cost elements of a company's income statement, known as profit & loss (P&L) responsibility. A general manager usually oversees most or all of ...
of his or her assigned product.Kotler, P. and Keller, K.L. ''Marketing Management,'' 12th ed., Pearson, 2006, To create an effective, cost-efficient marketing management strategy, firms must possess a detailed,
objective Objective may refer to: * Objective (optics), an element in a camera or microscope * ''The Objective'', a 2008 science fiction horror film * Objective pronoun, a personal pronoun that is used as a grammatical object * Objective Productions, a Brit ...
understanding of their own business and the
market Market is a term used to describe concepts such as: *Market (economics), system in which parties engage in transactions according to supply and demand *Market economy *Marketplace, a physical marketplace or public market Geography *Märket, an ...
in which they operate. In analyzing these issues, the discipline of marketing management often overlaps with the related discipline of
strategic planning Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to attain strategic goals. It may also extend to control mechanisms for guiding the implementation of the st ...
.


See also

*
Marketing effectiveness Marketing effectiveness is the measure of how effective a given marketer's go to market strategy is toward meeting the goal of maximizing their spending to achieve positive results in both the short- and long-term. It is also related to marketing ...
*
Predictive analytics Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from data mining, predictive modeling, and machine learning that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events. In busine ...
*
Strategic management In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of Resource management, resour ...
*
Outline of marketing The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to marketing: Marketing – social and managerial processes by which products, services, and value are exchanged in order to fulfill individuals' or groups' needs and wants ...


References


Further reading

* * *


External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Marketing Management Marketing Strategic management