piata de la a la z : anunturi imobiliare online, Cluj Napoca

Target a weakness in your competitor’s strength. A competitor’s strength is something they will be incapable of changing.

Study strengths to find weaknesses in your competitors.

We’ve all heard the saying, “garbage in, garbage out.” It’s the same when marketing your business.

Understanding your market provides you with a valuable base of insights into your business, your competitors, and your customers.

It will provide you with both a fact base and key insights that will drive the major tasks of choosing your target market, defining your brand, setting your objectives, and in setting strategies and tactics to make your plan happen.

Marketing managers face a host of decisions in handling marketing tasks. These range from major decisions such as what product features to design into a new product, how many salespeople to hire, or how much to spend on advertising, to minor decisions such as the wording or color for new packaging. Among the questions that marketers ask (and will be addressed in this text) are: How can we spot and choose the right market segment(s)? How can we differentiate our offering? How should we respond to customers who press for a lower price? How can we compete against lower-cost, lower-price rivals? How far can we go in customizing our offering for each customer? How can we grow our business? How can we build stronger brands? How can we reduce the cost of customer acquisition and keep customers loyal? How can we tell which customers are more important? How can we measure the payback from marketing communications? How can we improve sales-force productivity? How can we manage channel conflict? How can we get other departments to be more customer-oriented?

Marketing people are involved in marketing 10 types of entities: goods, services, experiences, events, persons, places, properties, organizations, information, and ideas.

Goods.

Physical goods constitute the bulk of most countries’ production and marketing effort. The United States produces and markets billions of physical goods, from eggs to steel to hair dryers. In developing nations, goods - particularly food, commodities, clothing, and housing—are the mainstay of the economy.

Services.
As economies advance, a growing proportion of their activities are focused on the production of services. The U.S. economy today consists of a 70–30 services-to-goods mix. Services include airlines, hotels, and maintenance and repair people, as well as professionals such as accountants, lawyers, engineers, and doctors. Many market offerings consist of a variable mix of goods and services.

Experiences.
By orchestrating several services and goods, one can create, stage, and market experiences. Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom is an experience; so is the Hard Rock Cafe.

Events.
Marketers promote time-based events, such as the Olympics, trade shows, sports events, and artistic performances.

Persons.
Celebrity marketing has become a major business. Artists, musicians, CEOs, physicians, high-profile lawyers and financiers, and other professionals draw help from celebrity marketers.

Places.
Cities, states, regions, and nations compete to attract tourists, factories, company headquarters, and new residents.5 Place marketers include economic development specialists, real estate agents, commercial banks, local business associations, and advertising and public relations agencies.

Properties.
Properties are intangible rights of ownership of either real property (real estate) or financial property (stocks and bonds). Properties are bought and sold, and this occasions a marketing effort by real estate agents (for real estate) and investment companies and banks (for securities).

Organizations.
Organizations actively work to build a strong, favorable image in the mind of their publics. Philips, the Dutch electronics company, advertises with the tag line, “Let’s Make Things Better.” The Body Shop and Ben & Jerry’s also gain attention by promoting social causes. Universities, museums, and performing arts organizations boost their public images to compete more successfully for audiences and funds.

Information.
The production, packaging, and distribution of information is one of society’s major industries.6 Among the marketers of information are schools and universities; publishers of encyclopedias, nonfiction books, and specialized magazines; makers of CDs; and Internet Web sites.

Ideas.
Every market offering has a basic idea at its core. In essence, products and services are platforms for delivering some idea or benefit to satisfy a core need.

In my lifetime, I've had more than a dozen managers. It's safe to say that many of them were forgettable, and some were awful. But the few that I admired or wanted to emulate took time to earn my trust. They wanted me to do my best work, and they knew that this was possible only if I could rely on them on a daily basis. This didn't mean they'd do whatever I asked or yield to my opinions by default. But it did mean that their behavior was predictable. More often than not they were up front with me about their commitments, motivations, and expectations. I knew where I stood, what my and their roles were, and how much support was available from them for what I needed to do.

As a leader or significant contributor to a team, everything depends on what assumptions people can make of you. When you say "I will get this done by tomorrow" or "I will talk to Sally and get her to agree with this," the other people in the room will make silent calculations, perhaps subconsciously, about the probability that what you say will turn out to be true. Over time, if you serve your team well, those odds should be very high. They will take you at your word and place their trust in you.

Although movies and television shows often portray leadership as a high-drama activity with heroes running into burning buildings or bravely fighting alone against hordes of enemiesreal leadership is about very simple, practical things. Do what you say and say what you mean. Admit when you're wrong. Enlist the opinions and ideas of others in decisions that impact them. If you can do these things more often than not, you will earn the trust of the people you work with. When a time comes where you must ask them to do something unpleasant or that they don't agree with, their trust in you will make your leadership possible.

This implies that to be a good leader, you do not need to be the best programmer, planner, architect, communicator, joke teller, designer, or anything else. All that is required is that you make trust an important thing to cultivate, and go out of your way to share it with the people around you. Therefore, to be a good leader, you must learn how to find, build, earn, and grant trust to othersas well as learn how to cultivate trust in yourself.

■ What are the tasks of marketing?
■ What are the major concepts and tools of marketing?
■ What orientations do companies exhibit in the marketplace?
■ How are companies and marketers responding to the new challenges?

One myth of marketing is that certain people have an innate ability to do it well, and others do not. Whenever this myth came up in conversation with marketing managers, I always asked for an explanation of that ability how to recognize it, categorize it, and, if possible, develop it in others. After discussion and debate, the only thing we usually identified is the ability to make things happen. Some people are able to apply their skills and talents in whatever combination necessary to move projects forward, and others cannot, even if they have the same or superior individual skills. The ability to make things happen is a combination of knowing how to be a catalyst or driver in a variety of different situations, and having the courage to do so.

Change is occurring at an accelerating rate; today is not like yesterday, and tomorrow
will be different from today. Continuing today’s strategy is risky; so is turning
to a new strategy. Therefore, tomorrow’s successful companies will have to heed three
certainties:
➤ Global forces will continue to affect everyone’s business and personal life.
➤ Technology will continue to advance and amaze us.
➤ There will be a continuing push toward deregulation of the economic sector.
These three developments—globalization, technological advances, and deregulation—
spell endless opportunities. But what is marketing and what does it have to do
with these issues?
Marketing deals with identifying and meeting human and social needs. One of
the shortest definitions of marketing is “meeting needs profitably.”