MARKETING MANAGEMENT ACTIVITIES

INTRODUCTION – MARKETING MANAGEMENT

Marketing management is the organizational discipline which focuses on the practical application of marketing orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and organization and on the management of a firm’s marketing resources and activities.

Globalization has led firms to market beyond the borders of their home countries, making international marketing highly significant and an integral part of a firm’s marketing strategy.

Marketing managers are often responsible for influencing the level, timing, and composition of customer demand accepted definition of the term. In part, this is because the role of a marketing manager can vary significantly based on a business’s size, corporate culture, and industry context. For example, in a large consumer products company, the marketing manager may act as the overall general manager of his or her assigned product.

To create an effective, cost-efficient marketing management strategy, firms must possess a detailed, objective understanding of their own business and the market in which they operate.

In analyzing these issues, the discipline of marketing management activities often overlaps with the related discipline of strategic planning.

Structure Marketing management employs various tools from economics and competitive strategy to analyze the industry context in which the firm operates. These include Porter’s five forces, analysis of strategic groups of competitors, value chain analysis and others. Depending on the industry, the regulatory context may also be important to examine in detail.

In competitor analysis, marketers build detailed profiles of each competitor in the market, focusing especially on their relative competitive strengths and weaknesses using SWOT analysis. Marketing managers will examine each competitor’s cost structure, sources of profits, resources and competencies, competitive positioning and product differentiation, degree of vertical integration, historical responses to industry developments, and other factors.

DEFINITION OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT ACTIVITIES

Marketing management activities can means management of all the activities related to marketing or in other words we can say, it refers to planning, organizing, directing and controlling the activities which result in exchange of goods and services.

Philip Kotler defined marketing management as “The art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping and growing customers through creating delivering and communicating superior customer values of management”.

Marketing management often finds it necessary to invest in research to collect the data required to perform accurate marketing analysis. As such, they often conduct market research (alternately marketing research) to obtain this information.

Some of the important activities involved in marketing management activities are as follows:

If we break up this definition we can say the marketing management involves the following activities:

1.  Choosing a Target Market: The activities of marketing management begin by finalising the target market for example; target market for medicine manufacturer is hospital, doctors, chemist shops, etc.

2.  Growing Customers in Target Market: After choosing a target market the next step in marketing  process is to take steps to increase number of customers by analysing the needs, wants and demand of customers and giving due importance to the satisfaction of customers.

3.  Creating Superior Value: The next step in marketing management process is to create some special value in the products to make your product better than competitor’s product. Special values can be added by offering various schemes for example, giving free insurance with car.

Most of the time marketing managers aim at increasing demand but sometimes they have to constrain or cut down demand due to shortage of supply by reducing expenses on promotion etc. The situation of reducing the demand was very common before 1990 (before liberalisation and privatisation). Now the main motive of marketing manager is to manage the demand effectively.

REFERENCES

1. Aaker, A.D., – Strategic market management, John Wiley & SONS, Inc., 2007.

2. Abell, D.F., Hammond, J.S., – Strategic Marketing Planning, Englewood Cliff Prentice Hall, pg.9, 1979

3. Bagozzi, R., – Marketing Management, Prentice Hall, 1998.

5. Deshpande , R., Webster, F.E., – Organizaţional Culture and marketing: defining the research agenda, Journal of Marketing, vol.53, January, pp.3-15, 1989.

6. Drucker, P.F., – Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices, Harper and Row, New York, 1973.

7. Drummond, G. – Strategic Marketing: Planning and Control, 2-nd edition, Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 2001.

8. Etzel, M.J., Walker, B.J., Stanton, W.J., – Fundamentals of Marketing, 9th Editon, Mcgraw-Hill Book Company, 1999.

9. Henderson, B.D., – Henderson on Corporate Strategy, Harpercollins College Div, pg.4, 1979, 0890115265

10. Jain S.C. – Marketing Planning & Strategy, Cincinnati, Thomson Learning, 2000.

12. Kohli, A.K., Jaworschi, B.J. – Market Orientation: The Construct, Research Proposition and Managerial Implications, Journal of Marketing, vol. 54, issue 2, pp. 1-18, 1990