Categorized | Advice

Marketing

Posted on 11 October 2008

What we are talking about here…
Marketing is about understanding customer needs, developing products and services to meet those needs and then making them easily available for people to buy. The whole process is about analysis, planning and control.
Why it is important…
“Failing to plan is planning to fail” – that is why it is important. Marketing is a central management task that makes sure that whatever it is the organisation is going to try to do, it has been properly thought through, costed out and implemented.
What you need to know…
There are basically three phases in the marketing process:

Phase 1: Analysis (of the market, industry, customer needs, competition and the organisation’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities and threats)

Phase 2: Drawing conclusions, setting objectives and deciding strategies (pricing, promotion, advertising, selling, PR, packaging etc.).

Phase 3: Financial assessments of the likely sales, the costs and the profitability.

Here is the basic marketing plan:

  1. THE PRODUCT/SERVICE – describe it!
  2. UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION – what is so different about it?
  3. THE MARKET – who are the customers?
  4. COMPETITION – the bad guys!
  5. S.W.O.T – Internal strengths, weaknesses, external opportunities, threats
  6. MARKETING CONCLUSIONS – So what does it all mean?
  7. OBJECTIVES – What are we going to do? (measurable, to a time scale)
  8. POSITIONING – How you fit in amongst the other competitors?
  9. STRATEGIES – How are we going to get there?
  10. FINANCIAL PLAN – What is it going to cost us and make us?
  11. ACTION PLAN – Who does what, when?
The next steps…
Start researching and writing your plan!

This post was written by:

Khan - who has written 297 posts on Higher Education and Career Blog.


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