Byznys angličtina: Marketing Strategies and Marketing Mix

Marketing Strategy

Marketing strategy could be described as a process that helps a company increase sales. It helps companies with allocation of resources and creating a sustainable competitive advantage. A good marketing strategy can help companies define their business goals and develop activities to achieve them. Marketing plans are one part of the marketing strategy and they enable companies to facilitate fulfilling market needs and reach marketing objectives. Marketing strategies commonly cover a few-year time span and define specific actions to be accomplished at specific times.

Good marketing strategy covers both internal and external environments. Internal environmental factors incorporate marketing mix, performance analysis and strategic constraints while external environmental factors cover customer analysis, competitor analysis and target market analysis. The essential component of a marketing strategy is to combine marketing with a company´s mission statement.

The most common marketing strategies are:

Strategies based on market dominance

Porter generic strategies

Innovation strategies

Growth strategies

Marketing strategy can be developed in five easy steps. First, the company´s unique selling proposition (USP) needs to be described. Then it is necessary to define the target market. Third, the company needs to work out the benefits of their products and services. As the fourth step, the products and services positioning should be thought over and finally marketing methods must be figured out.

Marketing Mix

Marketing mix is one of the tools which are used in products marketing. It is the essential tool for specifying the unique selling point. The main components of it are product, price, promotion and place. Additionally, three more “P”s are sometimes mentioned in relation to the marketing mix and they are process, physical evidence and people. In connection with a customer, the four main “P”s have been renamed and substituted for commodity, cost, channel and communication.

Product
Product can either mean a physical product itself or service. Concerning the product itself, it is necessary to determine what the customer will expect from their product, what needs it will satisfy, what features it will have to have in order to meet the needs and so on. Other parameters that are interesting for the costumer are the product styling, packaging, quality, repairs and support, accessories and warranty.

Price
Among the price solutions that need to be found are pricing strategy, retail price, volume discounts, seasonal pricing, price flexibility or bundling. On the whole, expected pricing response of competitors and profit margins should be taken into consideration.

Promotion
Promotion covers decisions on where and how to reach audience in relation to strategies of competitors. It can be helpful to produce a break-even analysis simply to be prepared for the costs and predict the profit.

Place
Place will delineate the channels of distribution which perform transactional, logistical and facilitating functions. Market coverage, channel member selection, logistics and levels of service need to be analysed and compared. Among other choices to be thought out are for example warehousing, transportation, order processing, inventory management and so on.