Selling V/S Marketing

1 Emphasis is on the product

2 Company Manufactures the product first
3 Management is sales volume oriented
4 Planning is short-run-oriented in terms of today’s products and markets
5 Stresses needs of seller
6 Views business as a good producing process
7 Emphasis on staying with existing technology and reducing costs
8 Different departments work as in a highly separate water tight compartments
9 Cost determines Price
10 Selling views customer as a last link in business.

MARKETING

1 Emphasis on consumer needs wants
2 Company first determines customers needs and wants and then decides out how to deliver a product to satisfy these wants
3 Management is profit oriented
4 Planning is long-run-oriented in today’s products and terms of new products, tomorrow’s markets and future growth
5 Stresses needs and wants of buyers
6 Views business as consumer producing process sat¬isfying process
7 Emphasis on innovation on every existing technol¬ogy and reducing every sphere, on providing better costs value to the customer by adopting a superior technology
8 All departments of the business integrated manner, the sole purpose being generation of consumer satisfaction
9. Consumer determine price, price determines cost
10. Marketing views the customer last link in business as the very purpose of the business

Customer perceived value

Our premise is that customers will buy from the firm that they see as offering the highest perceived value. Customer perceived value (CPV) is the difference between the prospective customer’s evaluation of all the benefits and all the costs of an offering and the perceived alternatives.Total customer value is the perceived monetary value of the bundle or economic, functional, and psychological benefits customers expect from a given market offering. Total customer cost is the bundle of costs customers expect to incur in evaluating, obtaining, using, and disposing of the given marketing officering.

Marketing in new economy

The changes in technology and economy are eliciting a new set of beliefs and practices on the part of business firms. Let’s look at the major business beliefs in the old economy and how these beliefs are shifting to the new economy. The new economy is affecting both, the way business and marketing are conducted. Let us start by analyzing how business practices are changing.

E – Marketing

Have you observed the vegetable vendor doing brisk business in the evening? He continues to interact with the customers while he is taking orders from others on cell-phone. The cell phone gives him a hands free approach and he can attend to more customer by taking orders on it, for home delivery. His business has almost doubled due to cell phone. And think of the customer, who can get most of his requirements sitting at home. In Bangalore, one of the “panwallahs” (Beatle leaf vendors) has started selling his wares through internet.

Selling vs Marketing

In general we use ‘marketing’ and ’selling’ as synonyms but there is a substantial difference between both the concepts. It is necessary to understand the differences between them for a successful marketing manager. Selling has a product focus and mostly producer driven. It is the action part of marketing only and has short – term goal of achieving market share. The emphasis is on price variation for closing the sale where the objective can be stated, as “I must somehow sell the product”. This short – term focus does not consider a prudential planning for building up the brand in the market place and winning competitive advantage through a high loyal set of customers. The end means of any sales activity is maximizing profits through sales maximization.

Business mission

Business mission

A strategic marketing plan starts with a clearly defined business mission. Mintzberg defines a mission as follows:

“A mission describes the organization’s basic function in society, in terms of the products and services it produces for its customers”.

A clear business mission should have each of the following elements:

· A Purpose

· A Strategy and Strategic Scope

· Policies and Standards of Behavior

· Values and Culture

· Mission and Vision of Samsung Electronics

· Mission of Lands’ End

Example:

Mission of Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola’s mission is to maximize shareholder value over time. It creates value by a strategy guided by six beliefs:

1. Consumer demand drives everything it does.

2. Brand Coca-Cola is the core of its business

3. It will serve consumers a broad selection of nonalcoholic ready-to-drink beverages

4. It will do excellent job marketing

5. It will think and act locally

6. It will lead as a model corporate citizen.

Pricing

Pricing

In the narrowest sense, price is the amount of money charged for a product or service. More broadly, price is the sum of all the values that consumers exchange for the benefits of having or using the product or service.

PRICE – The amt of money charged for a product or service, or the sum of the values that consumers exchange for the benefits of having or using the product or service.

“One can define price as that which people have to forego in order to acquire a product or service.” What does a buyer think? To a buyer, price is the value placed on what is exchanged. Something of value – usually purchasing power – is exchanged for satisfaction or utility. Purchasing power depends on a buyer’s income, credit, and wealth.

Pricing Strategies

The only time when price setting is not a problem is when you are a “price-taker” and has to set prices at the going rate, or else sell nothing at all. This normally only occurs under near-perfect market conditions, where products are almost identical. More usually, pricing decisions are among the most difficult that a business has to make. In considering these decisions it is important to distinguish between pricing strategy and tactics. Strategy is concerned with setting prices for the first time, either for a new product or for an existing product in a new market; tactics are about changing prices. Changes can be either self-initiated (to improve profitability or as a means of promotion) or in response to outside change (i.e. in costs or the prices of a competitor).

Sales Forecasting

Sales Forecasting

Sales forecasting is a difficult area of management. Most managers believe they are good at forecasting. However, forecasts made usually turn out to be wrong!

Reasons for undertaking sales forecasts

Businesses are forced to look well ahead in order to plan their investments, launch new products, and decide when to close or withdraw products and so on. The sales forecasting process is a critical one for most businesses. Key decisions that are derived from a sales forecast include:

· Employment levels required

· Promotional mix

· Investment in production capacity Types of forecasting

There are two major types of forecasting, which can be broadly described as macro and micro:

Macro forecasting is concerned with forecasting markets in total. This is about determining the existing level of Market Demand and considering what will happen to market demand in the future.
Micro forecasting is concerned with detailed unit sales forecasts. This is about determining a product’s market share in a particular industry and considering what will happen to that market share in the future.

Email Marketing

E-mail Marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

- sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,

- sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, - adding advertisements to e-mails sent by other companies to their customers, and - sending e-mails over the Internet, as e-mail did and does exist outside the Internet.

Email Marketing is still the most effective and widely used type of online advertising. Not only is it inexpensive to implement, it is also very well-received by consumers when done in a thoughtful way. What I mean by that is that you have to be able to think from the perspective of the people you are marketing to. You make them an offer that is appealing to them, and you deliver on that offer without becoming an annoyance. If you follow these seven simple steps, you will have no trouble taking advantage of this increasingly important marketing avenue.

1. Don’t skimp on market research

Email marketing is just like any other type of marketing. You have to know who you are marketing to and develop an understanding of what motivates them to take action. Then you will be able to design messages that appeal directly to the people most important to your success.

How can you offer a good value if you don’t know anything about your audience’s values? How could you ever counter their objectives if you didn’t know what makes them feel uneasy? Taking the time to analyze your market prior to launching your campaign will definitely pay off.

2. Plan your email campaign

Once you understand your market, you are ready to make decisions about what kind of email campaign you will mount. Take the time to do this in advance so that you can use the medium strategically and effectively based on what you already know about your audience. What sort of thing will they be happy to see in their inbox?

Many new email marketers imagine they’ll just toss out a newsletter every time they have a sale. And in some industries that will work. But you have to make sure you are providing a solid value to your recipient. In most cases, you’ll see better results if you use your newsletter as a venue to offer insider tips specific to your industry and your audience. By providing real value to your readers, you’ll not only retain them as readers but also earn their trust. And trust leads to better sales.

3. Build your mailing list with confidence

You’ve researched your target market and developed a plan to provide them with real value, so by this point you should feel very confident asking clients and contacts to subscribe to your newsletter. Every contact is an opportunity to promote your email list, both online and offline.

Your web site is a great place to start building up your mailing list. Begin by placing a large, attractive sign-up form in a prominent location on every page of your web site. Be sure to describe the benefits of joining, the frequency of your mailings, and an assurance that you won’t sell their email address. But remember, there is no reason to limit your promotion to the web. The people you interact with face to face are great candidates for your mailing list, whether they are customers standing at a cash register, clients sitting at a board table, or audience members at a speaking engagement.

Also, a word of caution: Don’t buy mailing lists.

When people think about starting an email marketing campaign, the next question tends to be “Where do I buy a list of email addresses.” This is entirely the wrong question, for a number of reasons. First of all, purchased email lists are not cheap. Second, you can kiss that money goodbye. The conversion rate that you’ll see on mailings to lists you didn’t build yourself are usually going to approach 0%.

If that isn’t bad enough, consider this: spam filtration is distributed. There are just a few main sources for the blacklists that prevent billions of spam messages from being delivered every day. That means that every person who marks one of your messages as spam makes it much less likely that all your other messages will be delivered. And that threatens the long-term viability of your email marketing efforts. So it behooves you to make sure that you never send a mailing to anyone who doesn’t specifically want to receive what you’re sending them.

4. Segment your mailing lists for laser-targeted campaigns

One of the biggest benefits of email marketing is the incredible degree of personalization that it makes possible. You can break your mailing lists apart by demographic, location, or even the types of actions they’ve taken in response to prior mailings.

It can be a little more work writing separate mailings for every little market segment, but the more work you put in the more benefit you’ll see. Plus, over time you’ll gain a better sense of which groups respond to which messages, and be able to combine and target them with an unmatched level of expertise. The more your messages approach the level of a one-to-one, personal appeal, the more effective they will tend to be.

5. Make it easy to unsubscribe from your list

Naturally, everyone would prefer that their subscribers continue to receive their email messages. But if they ever do decide they’ve had enough, it will be much better for you if they have an easy and highly visible unsubscribe link to click on.

Think about what you do when you can’t figure out how to unsubscribe from a mailing list. I know that, personally, if unsubscribing feels like a hassle I’ll just flag the message as spam. After doing that once or twice, Gmail never shows me messages from that mailing list again. As a list owner, this is something that you do not want to have happen to your messages, because every message that gets flagged as spam reduces the overall deliverability of your mailings.

6. For a great response, write great copy

The principles of great copy-writing are all pretty much the same for email marketing as for every other medium. Your content should meet the expectations that you built up for your list. If your subscribers signed up just to hear about your sales and special offers, then just write great sales copy. But they are expecting to receive information about news in their industry, weave your promotional content into that framework.

7. Split-test your messages

Email marketing software gives you the ability to test multiple versions of a message against one another so that you can see which one performs the best. This is something you should take advantage with every mailing: test the effectiveness of different headlines, layouts, images, and calls to action. Over time you can accumulate some incredibly powerful knowledge about what your market does and does not respond to.

Internet Advertising Methods

People opt for internet advertising methods because practically half of the world's population knows HTML. If you have your own business, you have to decide on what internet advertising method works for you. Ask yourself what are you going to avail of: the expensive internet advertising methods or the cheap ones? Others will pipe in "expensive!" immediately, but they don't know cheap internet advertising method attracts great benefits as well.

Here's the lowdown and a comparative look on the cheap and expensive internet advertising methods:

The Expensive:

1. Pop-ups. Not only is this expensive, but also outright annoying that visitors close pop-up windows without even bothering to know what they're all about. This is an internet advertising method that you can do without.

Fly ads are derivatives of pop-ups which are also equally irking to the visitors.

2. 1. Pop-ups. Not only is this expensive, but also outright annoying that visitors close pop-up windows without even bothering to know what they're all about. This is an internet advertising method that you can do without.

Fly ads are derivatives of pop-ups which are also equally irking to the visitors.

2. Pod casts.

Broadcast is to TV as pod cast is to internet. It's one sophisticated internet advertising method that can somehow hamper your budget. But if you're thinking results, pod casting is worth the money.

3. Paying the search engines.

How does this one work? When someone types in a keyword related to your site, your URL is automatically included in the first page of the top results. Fixed payment for the search engine allows just that. Expensive, yes, but if we're talking about Google and Yahoo search engines here, then don't give it a second thought.

This is associated with another internet advertising method: the pay-per-click system.

The Cheap:

1. Blogging

Go along the bandwagon and blog about your website. This is an internet advertising method that is popular as of the moment, so you never have to worry that this will never spur outcome. All you have to do is sign up for a blogging account, post and voila! You don't even need to pay!

2. Submit to not-so-big search engines.

This is cheap and dependable. If you submit your site to smaller search engines, you have bigger chances to get bigger results. Remember that the search engine giants can dwarf and overlook your site easily, so this internet advertising method might just be the right one for you.

3. Text links.

This is not just cheap...this is virtually free! Let someone text link your site and return the favor.

Cheap versus expensive, that's always the question that hounds on whenever we're trying to get something. In the field of internet advertising, just be wise enough to figure out what will suit your needs. Go for what you want as long as there are visible results.