Week 3: The Customer Decides Value!

This week's blog is a little all over the place.  The most important thing I learned from the lecture this week is that Marketing managers should understand the market and understand how value feeds into the market place.  The need to figure out what value consumers and customers want. 

“Drucker teaches us that The customer decides value and that marketers, but in a depression or down period, companies will fight for their products or services to stay with how the define it verse allowing learning it from customers definition…

Are marketers now more open minded with how the customer defines their product or service verse how the marketers would define it?

I believe that e/thing is budget driven vs quality driven.  Quality = giving the customer what they desire.  Budget = producing what the company can afford to make.

Education Portals and class:

One of the biggest mistakes made in marketing planning is that the focus is put on the product or service, but not the market that the product is being sold to. Companies should always focus is on the market.  ID market segments and focus on that segment that you’re going to pursue.

The educational portal that I focused on the most centered around what is a marketing strategy.  External factors influence marketing strategy

SLEPT Theory

1. Social

2. Legal

3. Economical

4. Political

5. Technological. 

And a 6^th one would be competition. 

A lot of these factors and characteristics that are external influences on the marketing strategy seem like common sense to me.  Think about the legal ramifications of marketing alcohol to minors.  In the end, businessnes need to adapt to external influences that can affect the company’s goals.

 1. Classmate’s question: In the education portal video titled "establishing a market research project" it discussed the major advantages of conducting a market research project: improving quality of decision-making, tracing problems, keeping current customers happy, and having an update on the current market. What about making sure that your organization is keeping up with the competition? Wouldn't you want to do market research to find out what advantages your competition has over you in order to begin marketing new projects which would bring those customers to your business instead?

This question is one that I had been contemplating as well.  My answer would be that businesses need to worry about their own ‘house’ first.  Competition is assuredly something to be worried about, but if the quality of the product/service that your business is offering isn’t’ meeting YOUR customer’s needs, then your marketing strategy to steal another’s customers won’t matter.

 2. Classmate’s question: When we look at SLEPT, do some influences carry more weight than others or is this dependent on the organization and industry marketers work in?

 Yes, some factors absolutely carry more weight than others and it is all dependent on the business’ marketing environment.  For example, a fast food business in California has more legal and political obligations than a fast food restaurant in Georgia does.  California restricts specific aspects of the food industry like how many calories can a meal have that also includes a toy?  Basically this was aimed at McDonalds in an attempt to lessen the calories of Happy Meals.

One of my classmate’s blogs that I would like to comment on is Briana’s blog.  She hit on some key points about certain statistics in the Phramasim module. After playing with the simulation and purchasing all of the reports, she saw that the Talley came up to $440K.  I like this aspect of pharmasim.  It can be very realistic.  The cost of information is high, but very necessary.  Pharmasim is a great tool.

Tune in Next Week!