Successful Marketing Jobs

• Product: The product aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual goods or services, and how it relates to the end-user’s needs and wants. The scope of a product generally includes supporting elements such as warranties, guarantees, and support.
• Pricing: This refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including discounts. The price need not be monetary - it can simply be what is exchanged for the product or services, e.g. time, energy, psychology or attention.
• Promotion: This includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, branding and refers to the various methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.
• Placement (or distribution): refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point of sale placement or retailing. This fourth P has also sometimes been called Place, referring to the channel by which a product or services is sold (e.g. online vs. retail), which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young adults, families, business people), etc.

These four elements are often referred to as the marketing mix, which a marketer can use to craft a marketing plan. The four Ps model is most useful when marketing low value consumer products. Industrial products, services, high value consumer products require adjustments to this model. Services marketing must account for the unique nature of services. Industrial or B2B marketing must account for the long term contractual agreements that are typical in supply chain transactions. Relationship marketing attempts to do this by looking at marketing from a long term relationship perspective rather than individual transactions.

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You want to why risk is very important in marketing this article tells us why.

“What is it about entrepreneurs that enables them to live so far on the edge? Do they thrive on the adrenaline of risk-taking?” This made me think of another question that I frequently encounter when people find out that I love ice climbing: “How can you live with the risk? Do you actually enjoy flirting with death?”

I think that these are all the same question, founded on the same implicit but ill-founded assumption: that risk equates to danger. Now, I am not going to try and convince you that there aren’t people who do love the rush of throwing the dice—with their life or their bank account. But just because someone won a multimillion-dollar windfall by buying lottery tickets with their retirement fund, or survived running a treacherous river without any training, the fact is not altered that what they were doing was gambling, not investing. The end result is as unrepeatable as it can be inadvisable.

Calculated Risks

So if it’s not the thrill of gambling, what does distinguish the serial entrepreneur and the ice climber from the population at large? For a start, they understand the very clear distinction between risk and danger. Second, and—perhaps most importantly—they know that there are ways to approach an otherwise dangerous task in such a way that the risk is reduced to an acceptable level.

Why do entrepreneurs and ice climbers repeatedly prompt questions of flirting with death and disaster? My best guess is that a lack of familiarity prevents nonpractitioners from seeing what lies behind the surface: the serious and conscientious preparation that such people bring to their respective activities. To illustrate this, let me tell you a bit about ice climbing.

Essential Requirements

Anyone who has ever walked on a frozen lake, gone ice skating or tried curling knows that ice is slippery and that it takes practice to move with any kind of confidence. Now imagine that the ice sheet is vertical rather than horizontal. This should give you some sense of the challenge of ice-climbing. But then remember there are four things that the prepared ice-climber brings to the base of any climb: training, tools, fitness, and partner(s)

The need for training is pretty obvious. One has to know what one is doing. Just as you have to learn the rules of the road in order to drive on the freeway, the ice climber has to be educated about technique, the appropriate use of tools and procedures, reading the ice, and the evaluation of objective hazards.

Tools have improved significantly over the past decades. Strapped to one’s feet, in a manner not unlike roller-skates (but much more secure) are crampons. These have one or more long, sharp, surrogate toes that you can kick into the ice, thereby giving purchase to your feet. In each hand one has a short, curved, ice axe that is designed to enable one to smoothly drive the pick into the frozen water, thereby giving you something to hold onto. In the event that someone above knocks off some ice, one wears a helmet to protect the head. For protection in the event of a fall, one has a rope firmly tied to a harness around the waist. While ascending, the climber regularly sets a hollow titanium screw into the ice. This forms part of a system of running anchors.

The Element of Trust

This last point relates to the fact that the whole exercise is based on trust; trust in our training, our assessment of the situation, our tools, fitness, and—especially—our partner. You wouldn’t consent to being driven on the freeway by someone you didn’t trust, or who was impaired in one way or another. Nor would any reasonable person put their life in the hands of such a person in the mountains. Your partner is someone you trust with your life. Perhaps because of that, a partner is also the kind of person who makes the experience doubly enjoyable, being shared.

The lessons for business are simple: the four considerations employed by the ice climber are exactly the same as those used by the serial entrepreneur or the effective business person. Of course it could be argued that the rich scope of business constitutes a much more amorphous challenge than a frozen waterfall. But that makes it all the more rash to proceed without carefully considering the following:

Training: What, in fact are the skills that would best equip me to engage this problem? Are they evident in my team? If so, how do I hone them? If not, how do I bring them onboard?

Tools: What tools are relevant to the problem? What are the potentially useful processes, technologies or other instruments that might give me purchase and protection throughout the exercise?

Fitness: How does one prepare? How rusty are my skills? What would constitute a warm-up exercise, or a “preliminary heat” that would let me find out if I were ready for the game?

Partners: No matter how good you and your team are, in most significant cases you will need partners. Do you have the right ones? My approach in this is simple: Get the best. If you can’t, you might want to question the wisdom of proceeding. After all, if they aren’t working for you, they may be working for someone on the other side of the table.

Risk is not only not to be avoided, it is to be embraced—for survival.

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Points and perks expire. What lasts is the company’s “personality,” as well as a two-way relationship with the customer that reinforces the brand

But how does a company ensure that its loyalty program achieves effective share of heart? Here are five principles to consider:

Roots of Loyalty

The first principal may be counterintuitive to those who work so hard trying to create committed customers: Loyalty is natural. Think about it. Identify with someone or something, then reinforce the credibility of our beliefs and one way we do that is by forming loyalties to them. So we give them repeat business and brag about them to our friends.

Appealing to the Heart

The second principle: behavior often comes from the heart.

We care about performers because we empathize with them. They lay themselves out for us—whether it’s an actor demonstrating raw emotion, a musician performing passionately, or an athlete leaving it all on the field. The common thread is vulnerability, the willingness to expose themselves and take a risk. And that creates a heartfelt response which makes us want to attend the movie, buy the CD, or sit in sub-zero temperatures watching the game (at full price, mind you).

Take Your Time

Love takes time. It’s as true in business as it is in romance.

A Two-Way Street

The fourth principle may be the most significant because of the damage that can be caused by ignoring it. Put simply, relationships are reciprocal.

True relationships develop along the lines of give-and-take. Relationships develop only so far as trust develops. And trust develops only by mutual disclosure and the circumspect protection of valuable information. The more data you collect on your customers, the greater the danger that the give-and-take balance will get out of whack.

It’s More than Numbers

Fifth, just because you can’t precisely measure something (or measure it easily) doesn’t mean it’s not working. We don’t know how poetry moves the heart but our lives would be much less fulfilling without it.

Behavior tends to get measured because it can be measured. But measurement can create its own reality and cause the loyalty marketing focus to become too narrowly defined.

Be polite, be respectful, and be patient with your loyalty marketing efforts and you’ll find that they not only increase short-term transactions but drive long-term affection as well. That affection will pay off for years to come, long after the points and perks expire.

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If you are like the majority of small business owners your marketing budget is limited. The most effective way to market your company is to create a well rounded program that combines sales activities with your marketing tactics. Your sales activities will not only decrease your out-of-pocket marketing expense but it also adds the value of interacting with your prospective customers and clients. This is priceless.Small businesses typically have a limited marketing budget if any at all. Does that mean you can’t run with the big dogs? Absolutely not. It just means you have to think a little more creatively.  How about launching your marketing campaign by doing one of the following:

• Call your vendors or associates and ask them to participate with you in co-op advertising.
• Take some time to send your existing customers’ referrals and buying incentives.
• Have you thought about introducing yourself to the media? Free publicity has the potential to boost your business. Position yourself as an expert in your field.
• Invite people into your store by piggybacking onto an event. What about a concert coming to town, willing to sell those tickets for them? If not, how about a walkathon that is taking place in your area, why not be public outreach and distribute their material?

When you do spend money on marketing, don’t forget to create a way to track those marketing efforts. You can do this by coding your ads, using multiple toll-free telephone numbers, and asking prospects where they heard about you. This enables you to notice when a marketing tactic stops working. You can then quickly replace it with a better choice or method.

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The essence of marketing is to understand you customers’ needs and develop a plan that surrounds those needs to create your offers. Let’s face it anyone that has a business has a need and desire to grow their business. The most effective way to grow and expand your business is by focusing on organic growth.

You can increase organic growth in four different ways. They are:

• Acquire more customers
• Persuade each customer to buy more products
• Persuade each customer to buy more expensive products or up selling each customer
• Persuade each customer to buy more profitable products

All four of these increase your revenue and profit. Let me encourage you to focus on the first which is to acquire more customers. Why? By acquiring more customers you increase your customer base and your revenues then come from a larger base.

How can you use marketing to acquire more customers?

• Create a strategic plan and spend time researching and planning.
• Guide your product development to reach out to customers you aren’t currently attracting.
• Price your products and services competitively.
• Develop your message and materials based on solution marketing.

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Marketers have seen the customer service process evolve from an area that received only marginal attention into a primary functional area.  In response to customers’ demands for responsive and reliable service, companies are investing heavily in innovative methods and processes to strengthen their service level.  These innovations include:

Increased Customer Self-Service

A major trend in customer service is the move by companies to encourage customers to be involved in helping solve their own service issues.  This can be seen in retail industries where self-service ranges from customers placing their own grocery products in shopping bags all the way to having customers do their own checkout including scanning products and making payment.  Also, as we will soon discuss, customers needing information are being encouraged by companies to first undertake the effort themselves often by visiting special company-provided information areas (see Website and Phone Accessible Knowledge Base below).  Only after they have explored these options are customers encouraged to contact customer service.

Revenue Generators

Companies that maintain a customer service staff have found that these people not only can help solve customer problems but they may also be in a position to convince customers to purchase more.  Many companies are now requiring sales training for their customer service personnel.  At a basic level customer service representatives may be trained to ask if customers are interested in hearing about other products or services.  If a customer shows interest then the representative will transfer the customer to a sales associate.  At a more advanced level the representative will shift to a selling role and attempt to get the customer to commit to additional product purchases.

Out-Sourcing

One of the most controversial developments impacting customer service is the move by many companies around the world to establish customer service functions outside of either their home country or the country in which their customers reside.  Called out-sourcing, companies pursue this strategy to both reduce cost and also increase service coverage.  For instance, having multiple customer service outlets around the world allows customers to talk via phone with a service person no matter what time of day.  The ability to move service to another country is only viable in large part due to technological developments (see Internet Telephone below).  But such moves have raised concerns on two fronts.  First, many see this trend as leading to a reduction of customer service jobs within a home country.  Second, customer service personnel located off-shore may lack sufficient training and often lack an understanding of the conditions within the customers’ local market both of which can affect service levels.  At the extreme a poorly managed move to out-source customer service can lead to a decrease in customer satisfaction which in the long-run could affect sales.

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Understanding customers and examining their role in the marketing process is very important.  We will see that for most organizations understanding customers is necessary not only because of their effect on marketing decisions but because customers’ activities influence the entire organization.

Yet, understanding customers is a never-ending challenge.  One reason is that not all customers are the same and, consequently, benefits sought by one customer may differ from those sought by another.  Because of this marketers must continually conduct marketing research to evaluate customers and to determine what they want.  And uncovering what customers want is made significantly easier if a company establishes methods designed to manage their customers.

In this tutorial we explore the techniques marketers use to manage their customers.  We begin by defining what a customer is and why they are important to an organization.  We then look at what tools and strategies must be in place to skillfully manage customers including the crucial requirement that marketers build relationships with their customers.  Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how servicing customers is often just as critical as selling products to them.

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What Are Patents, Trademarks, Servicemarks, and Copyrights?

Some people confuse patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Although there may be some similarities among these kinds of intellectual property protection, they are different and serve different purposes.

What Is a Patent?

A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Generally, the term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. U.S. patent grants are effective only within the United States, U.S. territories, and U.S. possessions. Under certain circumstances, patent term extensions or adjustments may be available.

The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, “the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling” the invention in the United States or “importing” the invention into the United States. What is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention. Once a patent is issued, the patentee must enforce the patent without aid of the USPTO.

There are three types of patents:

1) Utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof;

2) Design patents may be granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture; and

3) Plant patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant.

What Is a Trademark or Servicemark?

A trademark is a word, name, symbol, or device that is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others. A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than a product. The terms “trademark” and “mark” are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.

Trademark rights may be used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark. Trademarks which are used in interstate or foreign commerce may be registered with the USPTO. The registration procedure for trademarks and general information concerning trademarks is described on a separate page entitled “Basic Facts about Trademarks” (http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/tac/doc/basic/).

What Is a Copyright?

Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of “original works of authorship” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished. The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work publicly, or to display the copyrighted work publicly.

The copyright protects the form of expression rather than the subject matter of the writing. For example, a description of a machine could be copyrighted, but this would only prevent others from copying the description; it would not prevent others from writing a description of their own or from making and using the machine. Copyrights are registered by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.

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Before you learn more about marketing, you should get a basic impression of what marketing is. See What’s “Advertising, Marketing, Promotion, Public Relations and Publicity, and Sales?”. Basically, you might look at marketing as the wide range of activities involved in making sure that you’re continuing to meet the needs of your customers and are getting appropriate value in return. Think about marketing as “inbound” and “outbound” marketing. (In the following, consider “product” to be either a tangible product or a service — nonprofits often refer to these as “programs”.)Inbound Marketing Includes Market Research to Find Out:

1. What specific groups of potential customers/clients (markets) might have which specific needs (nonprofits often already have a very clear community need in mind when starting out with a new program — however, the emerging practice of nonprofit business development, or earned income development, often starts by researching a broad group of clients to identify new opportunities for programs)
2. How those needs might be met for each group (or target market), which suggests how a product might be designed to meet the need (nonprofits might think in terms of outcomes, or changes, to accomplish among the groups of clients in order to meet the needs)
3. How each of the target markets might choose to access the product, etc. (its “packaging”)
4. How much the customers/clients might be willing pay and how (pricing analysis)
5. Who the competitors are (competitor analysis)
6. How to design and describe the product such that customers/clients will buy from the organization, rather than from its competitors (its unique value proposition)
7. How the product should be identified — its personality — to be most identifiable (its naming and branding)

Outbound Marketing Includes:

1. Advertising and promotions (focused on the product)
2. Sales
3. Public and media relations (focused on the entire organization)
4. Customer service
5. Customer satisfaction

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