Marketing:

Explain the concept of market and market identification

● Market: refers to the overall environment where buyers and sellers interact to exchange
goods, services, or ideas. It encompasses all potential customers who share similar needs
and wants.
● Market Identification: This involves the process of recognizing and defining specific
segments within the larger market. Identifying target markets is crucial for effective
marketing strategies and resource allocation.
● Target Market: This is a specific group of customers that a business aims to reach with
its products or services. Target market identification involves analyzing demographics,
psychographics, and behavioral factors to tailor marketing efforts.
○ Demographics: Analyzing demographic factors such as age, gender, income,
education, and occupation to identify specific consumer groups.
○ Psychographics: Examining lifestyle, interests, attitudes, and values of potential
customers to understand their behavior and preferences.
○ Behavioral Factors: Understanding the buying habits, brand loyalty, product
usage patterns, and other behavioral aspects of consumers within a market.
○ Geographic Segmentation: Considering the geographical location of the target
market, which can include countries, regions, cities, or neighborhoods.

Explain the nature of market planning

● Research and Analysis:

○ Identifying Target Market: analyzing demographics, psychographics, and other
relevant factors to pinpoint the ideal customer base for a product or service.
○ Competitor Analysis: study competitors to identify strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis). This helps in crafting a unique value
proposition and differentiating the product or service in the market.
● Setting Objectives:
○ Setting of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound)
objectives. These goals should be clear, quantifiable, attainable, aligned with
overall strategy, and have a defined timeline.
● Developing Marketing Strategies:
○ Product Development: creating strategies for product development or
enhancement to meet the needs and desires of the target market.
○ Promotional Mix: advertising, personal selling, public relations, sales promotion,
and direct marketing
○ Pricing Strategies: cost, competition, and perceived value in the market.
● Implementation:
 ● Monitoring and Evaluation:
○ Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): include metrics such as sales figures, market
share, customer satisfaction, and return on investment.
○ Feedback Mechanisms: feedback loops to continually assess and adapt marketing
strategies based on changing market conditions.
● Adaptation and Improvement:
○ Continuous Improvement: regularly review results, learn from experiences, and
adapt strategies to stay competitive in the dynamic business environment.

Explain the concept of marketing strategies

● Describe factors used by businesses to position corporate brands

Describe the use of technology in selling function

● Technology is used to improve relationships with customers and finding new customers
in an efficient manner.
● Sales automation
○ supports the selling functions by making the sales process more efficient
○ keeps information for each prospect (contact name, title, address, phone number,
email address, etc.)
○ sales activities are recorded and schedules in the system
○ opportunities and what stage they are in the sales process
○ Email Campaigns: Automation tools enable the creation and execution of
targeted email campaigns, helping sales teams engage with prospects and
customers at scale
○ E-commerce Platforms:
■ Online Sales: For businesses with an e-commerce component, technology
facilitates online transactions, making it convenient for customers to make
purchases and for sales teams to manage online sales processes.
● Marketing automation
○ purpose of measuring results of marketing campaigns and automating the
marketing process (automatic delivery of a series of emails to a prospect followed
by a schedule phone call)
○ Telemarketing: Calling many numbers to gain new customers

● Explain the nature and scope of the selling function:

● Selling is responding to consumer needs and wants through planned, personalize
in order to influence purchase decisions and ensure satisfaction
● the selling function involves determining client needs and wants and responding
through planned, personalized, communication and marketing that influences
purchase decisions and enhances future business opportunities
 ● this includes all members of the distribution channel and marketing

Discuss motivational theories that impact buying behavior

● Motivational theories are based on maslow’s hierarchy of needs

○ Basic needs: need food, sleep, water
○ Safety: protection, shelter, employment, health
○ Love/belonging: family, friend, love relationships
○ Esteem: self esteem, confidence, gaining respect, achievements
○ Self actualization: creativity, morality and personal growth/fulfillment
○ Helps marketers understand how consumers make decisions on wants/needs
○ Important to understand what level of needs a customer is trying to meet in order
to deliver the appropriate product and marketing it as such
● Explain the nature of channels of distribution
- The path a product takes from its producer or manufacturer to the final user
- Types of channels of distribution:
- Exclusive: producer to consumer
- Selective: producer to distributor to consumer
- Intensive: producer to wholesaler to distributor to consumer
● Explain the nature of product bundling
- Businesses will bundle multiple similar products/services for a lower price than if
the customer was to buy the products separately
- Used to sell products that are harder to sell or aren’t selling as well

Management/Analysis:
● Explain the nature and scope of the product/service management function
- Product/service management involves any activities that develop or improve
products/services based on market research
- This includes creating a product mix (product lines that all work together like
Nestle having a product mix of cereal, milk, chocolates)
- Business should continuously update product mix throughout product life cycle
- Life cycle -> intro, growth, maturity, decline
- Product/service management is important to make sure that everything in the
product mix is perfect and caters to the target market
● Determine the factors affecting business risk
- Competitive environment: more powerful companies with better technology can
threaten the health of our business and steal clientele from us
- Currency fluctuation: The PEST of the country the business is in impacts how
safe the business is and if anything fluctuates, it could cause harm to the business
 -Supply chains: if a manufacturer shuts down it will cause harm to our production
of the product and affect how much revenue we can generate
- Information leaks: cybersecurity threats can hack into our business’s finances and
steal profit that will severely affect our business as then we would need to spend
many resources trying to gain this money back instead of growing the business
● Explain the role of situation analysis in the marketing planning process

Identify quality control measures

Quality control is testing the product to make sure they meet a standard
● Product design: Design and production teams work together to agree on a design that is
easily manufacturable and easy to replicate at a high quality
● Raw material Inspection: Agree on a standard of raw materials for suppliers to adhere
to and then inspect/audit the materials to make sure supplier kept word
● Mid-process quality control: Use automation to detect product deformities and create
regular intervals in production process when products are sensor-checked
● Product inspection: Randomly sample finished products and use durability, performance
and safety checks on them
● Quality audits: evaluate the effectiveness of these methods and gauge how many
deformed products there are in relation to perfect finished products

● Explain business ethics in product/service management

- Business ethics in product/service management involves making customers aware
of product information that can affect safety and health when the product is used
- E.g. product recalls, allergy information and labeling, and clear instructions on
how to use the good or service.

Product Development:
● Explain the nature of product/service branding
- Product/service branding is how a product interacts with its customers through
design, logo and messaging and how it distinguishes itself from competitors
- Branding can identify one product, a family of products, or all products of a
company. Brands connote various benefits, (e.g. quality and reliability.)
- The importance of branding is to build product recognition and customer loyalty,
ensure quality and consistency, and capitalize on brand exposure.
● Generate product ideas
- Tools used to generate product ideas can include brainstorming, creative thinking
processes and problem solving sessions
- A company can generate product ideas through market research
- New product ideas can come from a variety of sources: customers, competitors,
channel members and company employees.
 - Focus groups or idea sessions are used by companies to involve customers in
generating product ideas. In addition, companies that manufacture consumer
packaged goods use a task force approach to new product development.
- Gathering employees from various departments to take a new concept and run it
through the steps of product development
- Companies that manufacture and sell industrial products establish venture teams
that develop new products not part of the existing business.
● Describe factors used by marketers to position products/services
- Price and quality: products are promoted based on low prices or high quality
- Customers also make assumptions based on price, they think high prices
mean good quality and low prices mean a good value item/a steal
- Features/benefits: stressing the value of the product customer will get
- Comparing the product to other ones on the market: Like how tide frequently
markets itself as a better, efficient version of every other laundry detergent
- Design/ease of access: might promote an innovative design or tease other
products that work well with or enhance the product they are positioning
- Overall they will use anything to make the product stand out from the competition
and appeal to customers
● Identify the impact of product life cycles on marketing decisions
- Businesses have to adjust their product mix/promotions based on the life cycle
- four stages of the product life cycle: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline
- Introduction: need to focus on promoting the new product and getting as
much attention by customers and use discounts to build traffic
- Making sure customers know about benefits/unique features
- Growth: amping up production to meet product demand and further adding
unique features or making more recognizable vs. introducing in ads
- Maturity: there is a focus on customer satisfaction and improving the
product (adding new versions or features) to compete against competitors
as there are probably dupes the company needs to combat against
- Maturity is the most profitable stage or product’s peak
- Decline: Deciding when to drop the product because it is starting to lose
market share (dupes are winning) and see if they should discontinue or sell
the product, discount it, alter it or revamp it or let it go
● Explain the concept of product mix
- A product mix is all the products that a company makes or sells
- includes the width, length, depth and consistency of the product mix
- Width: total # of lines of products (types of product sections)
- Length: total # of products in each line
- Depth: variations of each product (e.g. color, size) (special editions)
- Consistency: similarity between different products in use, function, etc.
- How well the products work together
 ● Identify product opportunities
- Use marketing research to find problems that can be solved using a product
- A product opportunity exists when there is a gap between what is currently on the
market and the possibility for new or significantly improved products
- Product opportunities can result from emerging trends
- Product generation then stems from creative ideas on how to solve the problem
- New product opportunities can come from a variety of sources including
consumers, competitors, manufacturers and internal research
- Ideas can be generated during the market research process through both customers
and competitive analysis. Internal teams may be put together to evaluate new
product decisions including all departments of the business.
● Analyze product information to identify product features and benefits:
- Product feature is a physical attribute of the product
- Product benefit is the advantage or satisfaction the customer get from product
- Analyzing product information helps salespersons to sell the product to the
customer by giving features and benefits
- Product benefits can also link to product features
● Explain the nature of operations
- Daily activities that generate output for the business
- Managing resources used to create/deliver product/service
- Daily functions of the business conducted for the purpose of generating profits
- EX: advertising, utilities, rent, delivery, salaries

Clientele/Customer Service:

● Explain the factors that influence customer/client/business buying behavior:

1. Psychological: motivations, perception, learning, beliefs, attitudes
2. Personal: age and life stage, occupation, income, lifestyle (activities, interests,
opinions and demographics), personality
3. Social: groups they belong to, outside influences
4. Cultural: culture, subculture and social class, values they hold
● Explain the role of customer service as a component of selling relationships
- selling relationships is the sales technique that focuses on the relationship
between the buyer/salesperson rather than the price or product
- use customer service as a method to develop loyalty (which impacts future sales)
- If customer service is good (meaning customers like the salesperson and trust the
business), they are more inclined to buy from said salesperson/business
● Explain the key factors in building a clientele:
- Factors needed to build customer loyalty and reach many customers
- Word of mouth: customers will tell other people and create more clientele
- Reputation: quality of product should be good, and buying process = easy
 - Customer service: if customers find employees friendly they will buy again
- Sales follow up: following up will remind customers of business
- Efficiency: if it is easy to buy then customers will return to business
- Product mix: products should be unique to attract more customers (word of mouth)

Incentives:
● Explain the role of situation analysis in the marketing planning process:
- Allows businesses to identify the internal/external factors that impact marketing
- Helps business minimize business risks
- Both provide a business with an opportunity understand how they can react
effectively to changes in the market
- SWOT analysis and PEST analysis