Scarica Marketing Strategies: Understanding Customer Preferences and Segmentation e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! MARKETING Before selling a product, we have to know our customers, that’s marketing. Marketing is a set of strategies to place a product in the market and it follows a series of researches about the potential customer. It also follows some steps: 1. IDENTIFY customer’s prefencecies. 2. ANTICIPATE a product that customers are interested in. 3. SATISFY customer’s needs and wants. 4. MAKE A PROFIT. In business, the market is an audience of a product or service and it changes according to products and services that are offered. So, it’s extremely important to know who makes up the market. There are two types of market: ● INDUSTRIAL MARKET: specific for other industries ● CUSTOMER MARKET: made up of privates Once the market is determined, it is broken into subgroups or segments to a better knowledge of the buying audience to increase profits. Market segmentation is the identification of portions of the consumer market and grouping them according to certain characteristics, for instance: 1. DEMOGRAPHIC: gender, age, social class, … 2. GEOGRAPHIC: urban or rural area, population density, … 3. PSYCHOGRAPHIC: lifestyle, opinions, hobbies, … 4. BEHAVIOURAL: occasion, brand loyalty, readiness to buy, … Four main factors determine how a product will be marketed and these are called 4Ps. 1. PRODUCT which must provide value for the customer and give them what they want, and not what producers think they want. 2. PRICE is the main element of a product or a service and it must be calculated based on making a profit. One of the pricing strategies is “COST-PLUS PRICING”, which means that the costs of productions and other overheads are calculated and then a profit mark-up is added. 3. PLACE: the product must reach the right place, at the right time, and in the right quantity. 4. PROMOTION is the way a company provides customers with pieces of information about itself and its products. Everything is done to make a profit. Market research is a set of data from various sources to know the needs and wants of the potential customer. There are two types of data sources: ● PRIMARY DATA or FIELD RESEARCH: these data are gathered from observation, experiment, or surveys, such as face-to-face interviews and also online questionnaires. With this kind of data, we can provide specific data but at the same time, this is expensive and time-consuming. ● SECONDARY DATA or DESK RESOURCE: these data are ● gathered from documents, for instance, statistics, to know customers’ needs and wants. This is way cheaper and faster than a field resource because we refer to documents to know the potential customer. The fault of this gathering of data is that the Internet always tracks us while we’re surfing on it. The organization can decide to undertake market research themself or through a marketing research firm, so it means that before any research project it’s important to know the research objectives and then analyse and interpret the data correctly. There are a lot of primary data research methods: ● QUESTIONNAIRES, which is a fast and inexpensive way to gather a large amount of data in less time. The questions should be designed, which means they must be easy to understand and provide an unambiguous answer, for instance, a thick box. Nowadays, the majority of questionnaires are online. One fault of this research method is that it could be sent by post or email, so it's a passive method relying on people to complete and send back the questionnaire. ● STREET INTERVIEWS, a commonplace for this type of interview are crowded places, such as a mall or the main street. A researcher will stop you and ask some questions. Although an effective method of data gathering, it isn’t the most cost-effective as it involves paying the researchers for their time and not every interaction with the crowd they do. ● PHONE INTERVIEWS, the interviewer selects a random phone number to call which is chosen by a database. Then, the interviewer asks some questions that need to be in a specific order to not prejudice the interviewee’s views. One of the disadvantages is that many people are reluctant to waste their time and maybe wary of the real purpose. Internet marketing or i-marketing has changed a lot. The Internet can reach the customer much cheaper than it was, exempli gratia a multinational or a start-up. This kind of marketing may be used to carry out market research and to promote some products or services in addition to other methods. Nowadays, large companies use social media as an extension of their market research department, while small companies rely totally on these sources to find out what people need and want. When you use the like button or the company app you are sharing your personal information with these companies; however, so many customers are unaware that they’re sharing their information with other companies. Cookies are tracking codes and databases with which a company can track us and store our personal information for future use. Thanks to these devices, Internet advertising promoting products and services can be gathered to a specific customer, increasing their
