A View of the Marketing Process Washington DC

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You’re not alone if you’re reading this to find the answer to the question: “What is marketing anyway?” Everyone seems to know that marketing is an essential ingredient for business success, but when it comes time to say exactly what it is, certainty takes a nosedive. If you pick up the phone and call any number of marketing professors, marketing vice presidents, or marketing experts and ask them to define marketing, odds are you won’t get the same answer twice. In fact, if you look the word up in different dictionaries, you’ll find many different definitions. To settle the matter right up front, here is a plain-language description of what marketing — and what this article — is all about. Marketing is the process through which you create — and keep — customers.

Marketing is the matchmaker between what your business is selling and what your customers are buying.

Marketing covers all the steps that are involved to tailor your products, messages, distribution, customer service, and all other business actions to meet the desires of your most important business asset: your customer.

Marketing is a win-win partnership between your business and its market. Marketing isn’t about talking to your customers; it’s about talking with them. Marketing relies on two-way communication between your business and your buyer.

Seeing the Big Picture
Marketing is a nonstop cycle. It begins with customer knowledge and goes round to customer service before it begins all over again. Along the way, it involves product development, pricing, packaging, distribution, advertising and promotion, and all the steps involved in making the sale and serving the customer well.

The marketing wheel of fortune
Every successful marketing program — whether for a billion-dollar business or a hardworking individual — follows the marketing cycle.The process is exactly the same whether yours is a start-up or an existing business, whether your budget is large or small, whether your market is local or global, and whether you sell through the Internet, via direct mail, or through a bricks and mortar location. Just start at the top of the wheel and circle round clockwise in a neverending process to win and keep customers and to build a strong business in the process. As you loop around the marketing wheel, here are the actions you take:
1. Get to know your target customer and your marketing environment.

2. Tailor your product, pricing, packaging, and distribution strategies to address your customers’ needs, your market environment, and the competitive realities of your business.

3. Create and project marketing messages to grab attention, inspire interest, and move your prospects to buying decisions.

4. Go for and close the sale — but don’t stop there.

5. Once the sale is made, begin the customer-service phase. Work to ensure customer satisfaction so that you convert the initial sale into repeat business and word-of-mouth advertising for your business.

6. Talk with customers to gain input about their wants and needs and your products and services. Combine what you learn with other research about your market and competitive environment and use your findings to fine-tune your product, pricing, packaging, distribution, promotional messages, sales, and service. And so the marketing process goes round and round. In marketing, there are no shortcuts. You can’t just jump to the sale, or even to the advertising stage. To build a successful business, you need to follow every step in the marketing cycle.

Marketing and sales are not synonymous
People confuse the terms marketing and sales. They think that marketing is a high-powered or dressed-up way to say sales. Or they mesh the two words together into a single solution that they call marketing and sales. Selling is one of the ways you communicate your marketing message. Sales is the point at which the product is offered, the case is made, the purchasing decision occurs, and the business-to-customer exchange takes place. Selling is an important part of the marketing process, but it is not and never can be a replacement for it. Without all the steps that precede the sale — without all the tasks involved in fitting the product to the market in terms of features, price, packaging, and distribution (or availability), and without all the effort involved in developing awareness and interest through advertising, publicity, and promotions — without these, even the best sales effort stands only a fraction of a chance for success.

Jumpstarting Your Marketing Program
Business owners clear their calendars for the topic of marketing typically at
three predictable moments:

At the time of business start-up

When it’s time to accelerate business growth

When there’s a bump on the road to success, perhaps due to a loss of business because of economic or competitive threats Your business is likely in the midst of one of those three situations right now. As you prepare to kick your marketing efforts into high gear, flip back a page or two and remind yourself that marketing isn’t just about selling. It’s about attracting customers with good products and strong marketing communications, and then it’s about keeping customers with products and services that don’t just meet but far exceed their expectations. As part of the reward, you win repeat business, loyalty, and new customer referrals.

Marketing: The whole is greater than the parts
Advertising. Marketing. Sales. Promotions. What are the differences? The following story has circulated the marketing world for decades and offers some good answers for what’s what in the field of marketing communications:

If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying “Circus Coming to the Fairground Saturday,” that’s advertising.

If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s promotion.

If the elephant walks through the mayor’s flowerbed, that’s publicity.

And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that’s public relations.

If the town’s citizens go to the circus, and you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they’ll have spending money there, and answer questions, ultimately, if they spend a lot of money at the circus, that’s sales. Because marketing involves way more than marketing communications, here’s how the circus story might continue if it went on to show where research, product development, and the rest of the components of the marketing process fit in:

If, before painting the sign that says “Circus Coming to the Fairground Saturday,” you check community calendars to see whether conflicting events are scheduled, study who typically attends the circus, and figure out how much they’re willing to pay and what kinds of services and activities they prefer, that’s market research.

If you invent elephant ears for people to eat while they’re waiting for elephant rides, that’s product development.

If you create an offer that combines a circus ticket, an elephant ear, an elephant ride, and a memory-book elephant photo, that’s packaging.

If you get a restaurant named Elephants to sell your elephant package, that’s distribution.

If you ask everyone who took an elephant
ride to participate in a survey, that’s customer research.

If you follow up by sending each survey participant a thank-you note along with a twofor- one coupon to next year’s circus, that’s customer service.

And if you use the survey responses to develop new products, revise pricing, and enhance distribution, then you’ve started the marketing process all over again.

Marketing a start-up business
If your business is just starting up, you face a set of decisions that existing businesses have already made. Existing companies have existing business images to build upon, whereas your start-up business has a clean slate upon which to write exactly the right story. Before sending messages into the marketplace, know your answers to these questions:

What kind of customer do you want to serve?

How will your product compete with existing options available to your prospective customer?

What kind of business image will you need to build in order to gain your prospect’s attention, interest, and trust? A business setting out to serve corporate clients would hardly want to announce itself by placing free flyers in the grocery store entrance. It needs to present a much more exclusive, professional image than that, probably introducing itself through personal presentations or via letters on high-quality stationery accompanied by a credibility-building business brochure. On the other end of the spectrum, a start-up aiming to win business from cost-conscious customers probably wouldn’t want to introduce itself using full-page, full-color ads, because prospects would likely interpret such an investment as an indication that the advertiser’s fees are outside the range of their small budgets. To get your business image started on a strong marketing footing, define your target customer’s profile and then project communications capable of attracting that person’s awareness and prompting the feeling that, “Hey, this sounds like something for me.” Pay special attention to the chapters in Part I of this book. They can help you identify your customers, determine price and present your product, size up your competition, set your goals and objectives, establish your market position and brand, and create marketing messages that talk to the right prospects with the right messages.

Marketing to grow your business
Established businesses grow their revenues by following one of two main
routes:

Grow market share by pulling business away from competitors.

Grow customer share by increasing purchases made by existing customers, either by generating repeat business or by achieving larger sales volume at the time of each purchase. Almost always, the smartest route is to look inside your business first, work to shore up your product and service offerings, and strengthen your existing customer satisfaction and spending levels before trying to win new prospects into your clientele. Part V of this book offers a complete game plan to follow.

Scaling your program to meet your goal
Whether you’re launching a new business or accelerating growth of an existing enterprise, start by defining what you’re trying to achieve. Too often, small business owners feel overwhelmed by uncertainty over the scope of the marketing task. They aren’t sure how much money they should dedicate to the effort, whether they need to hire marketing professionals, and whether to create ads, brochures, and Web sites. They may have all kinds of other questions that get in the way of forward motion. And they delay launching their marketing efforts as a result. Here’s the solution: Rather than worry about the tools you need to do the job, first put the task in perspective by focusing on what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Ask yourself:

How much business are we trying to gain?

How many clients do we want to add? A social service agency might set a goal to raise $100,000 in donor funds. An accounting firm might want to attract six corporate clients. A retailer might want to build an additional $50,000 in sales. A doctor might want to attract 100 patients for a particular new service. A weekly newspaper might want to gain 500 new subscribers. By setting your goal first, the process of creating your marketing plan becomes a focused, goal-oriented, and vastly easier activity.

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