In the present age, when skipping of television commercials is merely a matter of pushing a button of television remote and traditional advertisements reach fewer number of people, marketing professionals are increasingly moving away from mass media to word-of-mouth marketing. In addition to the traditional word-of-mouth communications, emerging marketing channels like blogs, buzz, viral and e-mails are gaining popularity as the new electronic word-of-mouth. While a positive word-of-mouth accelerates the acceptance of brands in new markets and reduces brand promotional expenses in existing markets, a negative word-of-mouth may hamper a brand’s acceptance and tarnish its reputation. Since word-of-mouth marketing has been playing a major role in marketing of organizations and some of its aspects are still evolving and have strong Continue reading
Marketing Management
Marketing management combines the fields of marketing and management. Marketing consists of discovering consumer needs and wants, creating the goods and services that meet those needs and wants; and pricing, promoting, and delivering those goods and services. Doing so requires attention to six major areas – markets, products, prices, places, promotion, and people. Management is getting things done through other people. Managers engage in five key activities – planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling. Marketing management implies the integration of these concepts.
Advergaming – New Trend in Marketing Strategy
The question of what advergaming is can be approximated in different ways. In the manner of linguistic portmanteau it is of advertising and gaming. Technically, it is the practice of using video games to advertise a product, organization or viewpoint. As a term, it was coined by Anthony Giallourakis. Later on it was mentioned by Wired’s “Jargon Watch” column in 2001. An advergame is an online video game that has brand related images and/or themes embedded within it. As marketers have begun to catch on to the idea, websites containing advergames have been published by a diverse variety of corporations and non-profit organizations. Besides the usages of product placement within a game, a more effective and innovative way of Continue reading
Sustainability Mix – Greening the Marketing Mix
Sustainability has been a growing concern regarding the natural environment, which has resulted in the transformation of the competitive landscape and constraining companies to take a look at the costs and profits of greening their marketing mix. Sustainability is defined as the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainability issues have turned out to be progressively critical to corporate decision-makers as companies face public sensitivity, stricter guidelines, and growing stakeholder pressures focused on saving the common habitat. There has been a shift in the consumer’s preferences towards environmentally friendly products and services. Greening the marketing mix means incorporating the sustainability elements in the marketing mix. For Continue reading
4 C’s of Contemporary Marketing Mix
The contemporary market has developed with the approach of more prominent customer-centric marketing conditions. Companies’ main focus is to work with consumers, identify their needs, and design products according to their needs. We can see a shift towards personalization, interactivity, and genuine, direct discourse with the client. These changes have made way for innovation, customization, and networking. These new methodologies permit marketers not only to build a relationship with the target group but also to recognize the constantly changing consumer behavior. Moreover, it has also enabled the markets to react quickly to their competitors and anticipate future market trends. Hence, all these developments have provoked the advancements of new theoretical approaches that deal with specific rather than general marketing issues Continue reading
Green Marketing – History, Importance, Benefits and Problems
Customers often link green marketing with terms such as recyclable, refillable, ozone friendly, and environmentally friendly. Whilst these terms are green marketing claims, in general, green marketing is a much broader concept. Green marketing is applicable to consumer goods, industrial goods, and as well as services. Theoretically speaking, green marketing is about designing, developing, and delivering products that are eco-friendly which cause less possible harm to the environment and its stakeholders. The American Marketing Association (AMA) has defined green marketing as the marketing of products that are not harmful to the natural environment. History of Green Marketing Although some considerations were given to green marketing in the 1970s, it was actually in the late 1980s that the idea of green Continue reading
The Role of Big Data in Marketing
Big data is large and complex data sets that are collected by companies and governments. The data that involve many types of information arriving in increasing volumes and with the incredibly fast rates. Big data signifies colossal volumes of data are being generated from assorted sources such as business processes, machines networks, and social media. Historically, it is a challenge to reserve the enormous volume of data, by the progression computing capacity that storage is not an issue anymore. Big data can be classified into three types of data which is structured data, unstructured data, and semi-structured data. The structured data being easily entered, processed, queried, stored and recover into a fixed format. The typical examples of structured data contain Continue reading