BrockG

Chapter 16

Sales promotion and personal selling is a fine art of convincing your potential client that your product and/or service is the best one available or it is the best priced product and/or service on the market.  Your objectives for your sales promotion will be based on the behavior and not the attitude of you buyer.  Immediate purchase of your product and/or service is the overall goal of your sales promotion regardless of what you are attempting to sale.  Your target audience will fall in 1 of the 4 buyer type profiles.

1. Loyal Customers – people who buy or use your product and/or service.
2. Competitor’s Customers – people who buy a competitor’s product and/or service most or all of the time.
3. Brand Switchers – people who buy a variety of products and/or use a variety of different service companies.
4. Price Buyers – people who consistently buy the least expensive brand product and/or service. 

Your company marketing manager will have to determine the means in which he or she will focus the sales promotions.  Methods chosen must meet the objectives to ensure a successful campaign.  Tools used by companies to promote their business concise of several different venues.  Coupons and rebates, premiums, loyalty marketing program, frequent buyer program, sampling, contest and sweepstakes, point-of-purchasing promotions, online sales promotions, trade allowances, and push money offer. Some or all can and should be used in your sales promotional campaign at strategic times and seasons to allow for maximum penetration into a new ventured marketplace.

Chapter 18

Chapter 18 setting the right prices explains the different types of strategies and processes needed to have an effective campaign.  There are 4 steps outlined in the book.

1. Establish pricing goals
2. Estimate demand, costs, and profits.
3. Choose a price strategy to help determine a base price.
4. Fine-tune the base price with pricing tactics.

When establishing price goals, you will have to find the audience that needs your particular product and/or service.  The target audience will have to be very will defined. A good understanding of the marketplace as well as ones customer, can tell your company if the goals that were set are realistic. Estimate the demand of your product and/or service. Do a survey of the market to determine the demand for your product and/or service in targeted area and weight the difference of the feedback you receive.

Estimate a cost based on the data that you have collected that representative of the marketplace in which you plan on gaining a fair market share of.  Project the gross and net profits that the product and/or service will produce with respect to the said total expenditure to carry out the marketing campaign.  Determine the right pricing strategy your company will use to gain exposure.  Be it price shimming, penetration pricing, status quo pricing, pricing fixing, predatory pricing, and/or a mixture of all or several combined; be sure that you are paying close attention to all of the legal and ethical aspects of your price strategy campaign. Identify and examine the legal and ethical constraints on all of your companies pricing decisions before hand to determine the legal and ethical ramifications of your pricing strategies.

The Disney Corporation

The Disney Corporation

After doing my SWOT on Disney, I thought it might be a good idea to blog on the corporation.   Disney came into existence on October 16, 1923 as an animation production company.  Today the company is divided into four segments.  Studio Entertainment, Parks and Resorts, Consumer Products, and Media Networks.  Studio Entertainment is the heart and soul of the Disney Company.  The world-renowned animated features and live-action motion pictures were what the foundation of the Disney Company was built on. With the creation of Mickey Mouse and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the world's first full-length animated feature, the Disney name quickly became one and the same with quality entertainment for the whole family. Buena Vista Theatrical Productions is one of the largest producers of Broadway musicals, and the Buena Vista Music Group distributes original music and motion picture soundtracks under its four record labels, Walt Disney Records, Buena Vista Records, Hollywood Records and Lyric Street Records.  Walt Disney Parks & Resorts roots can be traced back to 1952, when Walt Disney formed Walt Disney Land Resort, based out of Anaheim, California.  Disney merchandising began in 1929 when Walt Disney was approached back a businessman about placing Mickey Mouse on a children’s book.  The product line now ranges from, apparel, toys, home décor, books, games, food, beverages, and electronics.

The Beginning History of the NFL

The Beginning History of the NFL

The modern football began when Rutgers and Princetonplayed a college soccer football game on November 6, 1869.  The teams used modified London Football Association rules and during the next seven years, the game gained favor with the major eastern schools over soccer.  Modern day Football was then born.  The first ever rules for the American Football League was written at the Massasoit Convention.  Walter Camp was known as the Father of American Football.  In 1892, an era in which football was a major event of local athletic clubs, the Allegheny Athletic Association (AAA) and the Pittsburgh Athletic Club (PAC).  Competition between two Pittsburgh area clubs led to the making of the first professional football player.  William Heffelfinger.  Heffelfinger was paid $500.00 by the AAA to play a game against the PAC.  Pudge, as he was called became the first individual to be paid to play football.  http://www.nfl.com/history/chronology/1869-1910

A Quiet Gian Awakes

SunGuard is the largest technology vendor in the financial services business to date, but no one has hardly even heard of the company.  The company employees approximately 14,000 employees, has $4 billion in annual sales and $25 trillion in assets on its accounting and portfolio management systems.  Company strategy is to market its PlanningStation applications to independent advisors.  PlanningStation is three different planning tools called “series”.  The foundation, Planning and Advisor series.  SunGuard plans on using all possible avenues to capture a larger audience, with it main competition coming from Intuit.  The company has a excellent track record of acquiring smaller technological companies and repacking them into their products by integrating them into their SunGuard system.

The company is banking on the platform of the software to sell itself.  Things such as its basic simplicity, usability, features, and cash flow projections data sheets.  SunGuard plans on using all medians to get the word out about its company and its software.  With its eyes set on a full fledge assault on marketing, SunGuard will most likely grab a large portion of the independent advisor section.

http://www.fa-mag.com/issues.php?id_content=2&idArticle=1372

Successful Website Marketing

IT PRO VISION is bringing the world of technology to you via the internet.  Here are some of the website promotions that used to get there product out.

• Search engine submission
• Linking-back links
• Pay-per-click-Google Adwords
• Article distribution

The article goes on explaining the way a company should go about planning their website promotion campaign through the above methods.  Search engines take the most time to index your information about your site and should be used first.  The biggest and most important search engine is Google, followed by Yahoo and MSN.  For fast indexing on Google a company and/or service should place blogs on http://blogger.com with links pointing to different articles and pages on your company site.

It takes approximately 2 days to get your company indexed on Google.  You will have to blog every 2-3 days to make this effective and use blogger.com being that this is Google’s own blogging site.  Your company and/or service will then need to start a Google Adwords campaign.  This is then followed by a newsletter to capture visitor’s addresses and build your business list.  Build back links with distribution RSS Feeds, link baiting and blogging etc.

Write yourself or have written some interesting and informative articles on your business.  You can distribute these articles through different article banks or libraries as well as submit them to the newspaper and publications. 

http://marketing.itprovision.net/

Strategic Planning

Chapter 2, “Strategic Planning for Competitive Advantage” is paramount when comes to information for the lay business person who is trying to perpetuate their business in the marketing arena.  Exhibit 2.1 Elements of Marketing Plan, shows you step by step how to prepare a plan.  I truly believe that all businesses should develop a Marketing Plan in order for the product or service to be fully successfully and competitive in today’s fast pace world.  Here is the layout of the plan itself as outlined in the book.

• Business

  Mission

  Statement
• Objectives
• Situation or SWOT Analysis
• Marketing Strategy encompasses two different fields of strategy.  Targeting Marketing & Marketing Mix.  Marketing Mix is then subdivided into four groups.
  1. Product
  2. Promotion
  3. Distribution
  4. Price

• Implementation Evaluation Control is the final step in the Marketing plan.

Let’s explore and explain each step somewhat for this text.

Business Mission Statement answers the question of what business are you in.

Objectives touch on tells the audience what is to be accomplished through marketing the business.

SWOT identifies internal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and lastly strengths of the business.

Marketing Strategy encompasses and details market penetration, market development, product development, and diversification.   Finally, Implementation is apply all of the resource and development of the marketing plan into reality with a time frame and goal at accomplishing a certain percent of the market share in your product field or service.  http://www.abanet.org/lpm/lpt/articles/mkt06041.html,

http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/9-22-2005-77341.asp, http://ezinearticles.com/?Marketing-Events:-7-Keys-to-Timing&id=329485.

Earley Marketing

According to Chapter One, marketing “is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customers’ relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”   Exchange has to happen to complete the cycle once a form of effective marketing has taken place.  One must have a good or service to offer for monetary value or barter something in return. 

Harper’s Weekly was one of the leading papers developed during the 1857-1872 period.  It reached approximately 100,000 readers on a regular basis and reached 300,000 during the Civil War.  During that time, cartoons and symbols were used to illustrate items that local venders were trying to sell. Endorsements and testimonials were often used and printed by the paper to show how pleased a person and/ or company was with a particular product and/or service.  Mrs. Jefferson Davis’s testimonial on the precision running and low maintenance Grover & Baker Noiseless Family Sewing Machine all but sealed the deal and increased sales on the machines during that time.

The Harper’s Weekly pioneered the way for the use of testimonials by very important individuals or their spouse’s pre and post Civil War time.  http://advertising.harpweek.com/Default.htm

Introduction

Hello everyone, my name is Brock.  I am a male student who is a junior at this time and I have been  attending Northwood Unversity for the past 3 years.  My goal is to complete all of my studies by next winter, and graduate with a Bachelors in Business Management with a minor in Economics.  I am participating in Marketing 208.  I want to apologize to all of the students in my class as well as the teacher for missing the first night of class.  I do not forsee this occuring anytime in the near future.