Over the last two editions, we have dwelt on the basic concepts and principles of marketing. In the last article, we looked at
Value chain and delivery network. Value chain comprises firms and sub-firms that carry out value-creating activities on a firm’s products, while a value delivery network is made up of the company and its associates and customers who partner with each other to deliver performance of the entire system.
Product. This is the bundle of benefits that satisfies a need, or can be offered in a market to satisfy a need or want. Product comes in the form of services, tangibles, experiences, ideas, person, place, etc.
Price. This is the total cost the customer bears to enjoy the bundle of benefits offered by the product.
Place. This is where and how the product will be provided or made available to the customer.
Promotion. Comprises communication and awareness creation for and about the product, price and placement and other things that the customer and potential customers need to know about the product.
Marketing mix. Refers to the specific/relative emphasis or proportion of the set of controllable tactical marketing tools—product, price, place, and promotion—that a firm “blends” to produce the response it wants in the target market.
Other necessary marketing concepts and principles worth exploring include:
MARKETING ORIENTATION: A marketer exhibits different attitudes to the market and understanding of its behaviour. In marketing parlance, it is called marketing orientation. These different orientations, summarised below, resemble historical development of marketing:
Production concept is the idea that consumers will favour products that are available or highly affordable. Efforts are made at making products cheap, often by compromising quality. Of course, large scale production is required to make a product cheap.
Product concept is the idea that consumers will favour products that offer the most quality, performance, and features. Here, an organisation devote its energy to making continuous product improvements. Little attention is paid to the exact needs of the consumer.
Selling concept is the idea that consumers will not buy enough of the firm’s products unless it undertakes a large scale selling and promotion effort. This is done by putting massive pressure on the consumer. Coercion is not outside the game.
Marketing concept is the idea that achieving organisational goals depends on knowing the needs and wants of the target markets and delivering the desired satisfactions better than competitors do. The goal is to find needs and fill better than others. Of course, this is the commonest orientation of professional marketers. It is not perfect, however.
Societal marketing concept is the idea that a company should make good marketing decisions by considering consumers’ wants, the company’s requirements, consumers’ long-term interests, and society’s long-run interests. This came out of the observation that the consumer does not always know what is best for them, or not capable of making the best choice. On the surface, this may sound illogical, but when we consider, for example, the growth of the tobacco and fast-food industry, despite the general understanding that tobacco and high sugar/salt foods are dangerous to our health and wellbeing, the truth in this becomes obvious. This marketing concept is the most widespread and acceptable stance
MARKET SEGMENTATION is the process that companies use to divide large, heterogeneous markets into small markets, based on their needs, characteristics or behaviour, so that they can be reached more efficiently and effectively with products or services that match their unique needs and marketing mixes. This is coming from the fact that a given “market” may be too big to be taken on (in terms of resources, location, etc.) and/or too diverse to be efficiently/effectively reached by marketing stimuli and effort.
From the fore going, we can describe a MARKET SEGMENT as a group of consumers who respond in a similar way to a given set of marketing stimuli. Consumer marketing may be segmented by:
Geographic segmentation – divides the market into different geographical units such as nations, regions, states, counties, or cities.
Demographic segmentation – (division into groups based on based on variables such as age, gender, family size, family life cycle, income, occupation, education, religion, race, generation, and nationality.
Psychographic segmentation – (based on social class, lifestyle, or personality traits
Behavioural segmentation (based on their knowledge, attitudes, uses, benefits or responses to a product).
MARKET TARGETING is the process of evaluating each market segment’s attractiveness and selecting one or more segments to enter or focus on. To be useful, a market segment is expected to be
Measurable
Accessible
Substantial
Actionable
Differentiable
MARKET POSITIONING is the deliberate effort by marketing practitioners to place a product in a clear, distinctive, and desirable place, relative to competing products in the minds of the target consumer, often through communication and the management of the 4Ps.
Note that product position is the way the product is defined (supposedly defined) by consumers on important attributes—the place the product occupies in consumers’ minds, relative to competing products. This is often based on perceptions, impressions, and feelings. The success of a positioning is indicated by the effectiveness of its differentiation.
DIFFERENTIATION is described as identifying and choosing a set of possible competitive advantages to build a position to provide a tangible or a perception of superior value. Successfully differentiated products feature meaningful and valuable differences that distinguish clearly the company’s offering from that of the competition. Differences are stronger when they are important, distinctive, superior, pre-emptive, affordable, and profitable. Possible strategy can be
Product differentiation
Services differentiation
Channel differentiation
People differentiation
Image differentiation
We have gone far with this topic and we can regard it as concluded here. But we are not done with dealing with pharmaceutical marketing. Many thanks for your time and attention.
Tunde Oyeniran, a Sales/Marketing Strategist, Selling/Sales Management Trainer and Personal Sales Coach is the Lead Consultant, Ekini White Tulip Consulting Limited, Lagos. We deliver Training, Recruitment, Online Medical Communications Service and Field Force Management Solutions Feedback. Channels 080-2960-6103 (SMS/WhatsApp) /ekiniwhitetuliptraining@gmail.com or check out https://fb.me/EkiniWhiteTulipConsulting
