Marketing management is the strategic organizational discipline that focuses on the practical application of marketing orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and organizations and on the management of marketing resources and activities.
Compare marketology,
which Aghazadeh defines in terms of "recognizing, generating and disseminating market insight to ensure better market-related decisions".
Structure
Marketing management employs tools from economics and competitive strategy to analyze the industry context in which the firm operates. These include Porter's five forces, analysis of strategic groups of competitors, value chain analysis and others.
In competitor analysis, marketers build detailed profiles of each competitor in the market, focusing on their relative competitive strengths and weaknesses using SWOT analysis. Marketing managers will examine each competitor's cost structure, sources of profits, resources and competencies, competitive positioning and product differentiation, degree of vertical integration, historical responses to industry developments, and other factors.
Marketing management often implies market research and marketing research to perform a primary analysis. For this, a variety of techniques are implemented. Some of the most common ones include:
- Qualitative marketing research, such as focus groups and various types of interviews
- Quantitative marketing research, such as statistical surveys
- Experimental techniques such as test markets
- Observational techniques such as ethnographic (on-site) observation
Marketing managers may also design and oversee various environmental scanning and competitive intelligence processes to identify trends and inform the company's marketing analysis.
thumb|Example of SWOT analysis chart
Brand audit
A brand audit is a thorough examination of a brand's current position in an industry compared to its competitors and the examination of its effectiveness. When it comes to brand auditing, six questions should be carefully examined and assessed:
- How well the business's current brand strategy is working?
- What are the company's established resource strengths and weaknesses?
- What are its external opportunities and threats?
- How competitive are the business' prices and costs?
- How strong is the business's competitive position in comparison to its competitors?
- What strategic issues are affecting the business?
When a business conducts a brand audit, the goal is to identify its resource strengths, weaknesses, assess market opportunities and external threats, future profitability, and its competitive standing in comparison to existing competitors. A brand audit establishes the strategic elements needed to improve the brand's positioning and competitive capabilities within the industry. Once a brand is audited, any business that ends up with strong financial performance and market position is likely to have a properly conceived and effectively executed brand strategy.
A brand audit examines whether a business's market share is increasing, decreasing, or remaining stable. It determines whether the company's profit margin is improving or declining and how it compares with that of established competitors. Additionally, a brand audit analyzes trends in net profits, return on investments, and overall economic value. It also evaluates whether the business's financial strength and credit rating are improving or deteriorating. Beyond financial metrics, a brand audit also assesses the business's image and reputation among its customers. It examines whether the business is perceived as an industry leader in areas such as technology, product or service innovation, and customer service. These factors play a significant role in shaping customer decisions and overall brand perception.
A brand audit usually focuses on a business' strengths and resource capabilities because these are the elements that enhance its competitiveness. A business' competitive strengths can exist in several forms including skilled or pertinent expertise, valuable physical and human assets, organizational assets and intangible assets, competitive capabilities, achievements and alliances or cooperative ventures that position the business into a competitive advantage.
The purpose of a brand audit is to determine whether a business’ resource strengths are competitive assets or potential liabilities. This type of audit seeks to ensure that a business maintains a distinctive competence that allows it to build and reinforce its competitive advantage. Furthermore, a well-executed brand audit seeks to establish what a business capitalizes on best, its level of expertise, resource strengths, and strongest competitive capabilities, while aiming to identify a business's current position and potential future performance.
Marketing strategy
Two customer segments are often selected as targets because they score highly on two dimensions:
- The segment is attractive to serve because it is large, growing, makes frequent purchases, is not price sensitive (i.e. is willing to pay high prices), or other factors; and
- The company has the resources and capabilities to compete for the segment's business, can meet their needs better than the competition, and can do so profitably.
The implication of selecting target segments is that the business will subsequently allocate more resources to acquire and retain customers in the target segments than it will for other, non-targeted customers. In some cases, the firm may go so far as to turn away customers who are not in its target segment. The doorman at a swanky nightclub, for example, may deny entry to unfashionably dressed individuals because the business has made a strategic decision to target the "high fashion" segment of nightclub patrons.
In conjunction with targeting decisions, marketing managers will identify the desired positioning they want the company, product, or brand to occupy in the target customer's mind. This positioning is often an encapsulation of a key benefit the company's product or service offers that is differentiated and superior to the benefits offered by competitive products. For example, Volvo has traditionally positioned its products in the automobile market in North America in order to be perceived as the leader in "safety", whereas BMW has traditionally positioned its brand to be perceived as the leader in "performance".
Ideally, a firm's positioning can be maintained over a long period of time because the company possesses or can develop, some form of sustainable competitive advantage. The positioning should also be sufficiently relevant to the target segment such that it will drive the purchasing behavior of target customers. Marketing managers are often responsible for influencing the level, timing, and composition of customer demand. In part, this is because the role of a marketing manager (or sometimes called managing marketer in small- and medium-sized enterprises) can vary significantly based on a business's size, corporate culture, and industry context.
For example, in small and medium-sized enterprises, the managing marketer may contribute to both managerial and marketing operations roles for the company brands. In a large consumer products company, the marketing manager may act as the overall general manager of his or her assigned product.
To create an effective, cost-efficient marketing management strategy, firms must possess a detailed, objective understanding of their own business and the market in which they operate. In analyzing these issues, the discipline of marketing management often overlaps with the related discipline of strategic planning.
See also
- Marketing effectiveness
- Predictive analytics
- Strategic management
- Outline of marketing