Understanding course readings and their implications for professional practice

Marketing Management

Customer Value Equation of the Product

Product Marketing Mix

Product Promotion Process

Environmental Analysis

Target Market Analysis

Competitive Analysis

Global Ethical Marketing Considerations

The globe and its entire human race in the twenty first is witnessing revolution in many facets of life and technological boom in communication is one of the immense transformations that have changed the standard and ways of living. Quite a few of the technological brands and products are surging ahead even to the leading economies as well as underdeveloped and developing nations. Apple iPhone is one of those brands that have become widely accepted and well-known, and has captured numerous consumers ranging from U.S. To Europe to Asia (White, 2012).

Apple iPhone is one of the U.S. based brands that offers hi-tech communication product (mobile phone) to its customers with a wide variety of features such as games, music, videos, web connectivity and many more apart from the traditional communicating or talking and message recording facility. Due to such extraordinarily additional features and qualities, Apple iPhone has developed its image into a complete entertainment package. Apple iPhone is one of the smart phones that are a recent invention of Apple for its consumers all over the world (O'Grady, 2009).

Apple iPhone has been the U.S. brand that has progressed at a much faster pace in comparison to its mainstream counterparts in various parts of the world. Since the technological products offers uniformity in taste profiles along with cultural acceptance of upscale, it created huge opportunities for the U.S. To expand to international market as well on a broad spectrum (O'Grady, 2009).

The region of South Asia is one of the emerging and growing markets for Apple iPhone that provides them with huge opportunity to extend to this market due to numerous reasons. Even though the regions of South Asia depicts that it is an underdeveloped and developing nations, yet these market are a huge potential market that is widely utilizing the technological products and services at an accelerated pace.

Customer Value Equation of the Product

The customer value equation or proposition refers to the complete set of benefits that a customer would receive as a promise by the brand for which the consumers are willing to pay added cost to it. Form, place, time and possession are the four fundamental utilities on which the customer value is based.

The first utility of Customer Value Equation is form, which denotes the product or service offered to the consumers that is based on the needs and desires of the consumers. Looking at Apple's iPhone, it has been specifically designed keeping in view the demands of the consumers on a broad spectrum and is presented with added value services. Improved productivity is the ultimate consequence of iPhone, as the consumers have the wide channel of applications. The hardware and software specifications provide the company and its users with competitive advantage.

The second utility is the place and the convenience of availability of the product (that particularly refers to the distribution channels) and Apple iPhone is widely available at Apple stores. Indeed, Apple provides its consumers with a wide platform of its website, forums and blogs. These blogs and forums provide the users with a wide range of FAQs that aids and provides effective solutions and alternatives to the problems faced by the consumers. Moreover, the consumers can also post their queries to get the technical answers to their problems. Besides, the website is also available with extensive information for the help of the consumers.

Time (the third utility of customer value) represents that Apple has been efficient in their supply chain, which ensures the consumers that the products are delivered on time. The last utility, possession, provides the customers with the ownership of the product that allows them to obtain overall benefits. This indicates that Apple iPhone is designed to provide the customers with a high performance element.

Product Marketing Mix

The marketing mix is the comprehensive process in which the pricing, promotion and distribution is administered in the planning and execution. The marketing mix is applied in order to fulfill the organizational goals and objectives on an overall and effective manner. Based on the principles of marketing mix, the brand of Apple constantly researched the market so that they can cater a huge market as their potential target audience (Ferrell & Hartline, 2010).

From the facts, it has come to the forefront that Apple introduced the iPhone when they examined that market for smart phones is emerging. However, the potential business and corporate customers were selected as their target audience when they figured that the need for an effective device is needed by young professions during their travelling that can connect and make them stay in touch as well as record and access information or critical data during travelling and schedule details. Therefore, Apple included the facilities of emails, notes, calendar, and address book for appointments, and various other applications for information record (Ferrell & Hartline, 2010).

While on the other side, the students were segmented on the basis of their needs and high demands of performing functions with multiple gadgets and being in style and trendy. In this regard, Apple offered the young buyers with internet, TV shows, YouTube and so forth that can make them become a fashion statement (Ferrell & Hartline, 2010).

From the perspective of the positioning elements, Apple positioned iPhone as a flexible and convenient phone with the consideration of the users for a trendy and fashionable phone, which had value added services for professional use as well. Nevertheless, the strong brand image and reputation helped Apple to enhance their image with drawing the focus of iPhone towards the new technological innovation. This signifies that Apple did not draw their core attention in building the image; rather, they focused on the promotional techniques that can represent iPhone as a single device not only as a communication tool, but also as an inclusive entertainment package with multiple innovative features and applications (Ferrell & Hartline, 2010).

Product Promotion Process

The marketing process involves the process of understanding the consumers, analyzing the potential market, analyzing the competition, research on the distribution process, defining marketing mix, financial analysis and monitoring of the entire process. Promotion is one of the integral components in the marketing process that provides an opportunity to the marketer to cater a wide range of consumers. The development, execution and assessment of the campaign lead the marketer with the correct understanding of how the consumers are responding to the particular product. Therefore, it is a very crucial process that ought to be administered with severity and seriousness.

Considering the Apple iPhone, it is a hi-tech product, which means that the users and consumers utilizing this product have a wide know-how and understanding of technology. Moreover, in this contemporary world, the use of technology (especially internet and social media websites) have become the most common and widespread channel for effective communication with the consumers. Numerous people are engaged with internet; therefore, social media websites is one of the effective and powerful techniques to place advertisement of iPhone.

Many of the social media websites like Facebook and others provides the brands to have their own space with their advertisements, promotional campaigns and even surveys that the users can rate and fill. In addition, the applications of these social media websites provide the brands to measure the users' connectivity and have deep analysis with reference to user's liking. The brands have various options (from the social media websites) to engage the wide ranging consumers through initiating a thread, posting regular updates of the brand, recent pictures or videos portraying the enhanced features and so forth. In this manner, Apple iPhone can have a simple and innovative way of promotional campaign that can alleviate their communication process to a much wider range of consumers.

Environmental Analysis

Environmental Analysis is usually the PEST Analysis (Political, Environmental, Social and Technical). Environmental analysis facilitates the marketer with gaining insight on the trends and factors that might affect the sales of the product or service; hence, it is pivotal to take into deep assessment. While looking at the environmental trends of South Asian region, studies have highlighted that many of the countries in South Asia such as Pakistan is a growing industry of the mobile market, with elevating demands of Apple iPhone. This growing demand would immensely affect the sales of the product within the region (Baum, Hackstein & Mehling, 2012).

The political and legal factors also affect the sales of Apple iPhone in the region of South Asia. This is predominantly due to the reason that governments are helping the local products in their promotion due to which they have become the major competitive and subsidizing forces that eventually affects the sales of Apple iPhone. Furthermore, the high tariffs and trade negotiations influence and affect the iPhone sales as well. Tariffs and trade negotiations raise the overall price of the iPhone in such a way that the addition of import fee becomes an addition when the product is sold on the international market (Baum, Hackstein & Mehling, 2012).

The poor political international relations and terrorism in the South Asia has also come under evaluation as the leading aspect that affects the sales within the region. Additionally, the political flux and conflicts between U.S. with South Asian countries also hamper the sales of Apple iPhone in these regions. The economical depression has also created somewhat affect on the sales, but the technological and social influence (within the music industry and enhanced lifestyle) has been more powerful and persuading that has positively affected the sales of iPhone within South Asian regions. The technological advancements on the other hand also negatively affect the iPhone sales (Baum, Hackstein & Mehling, 2012).

Target Market Analysis

Apple iPhone has targeted a number of users over a wide range in the United States. This signifies that Apple did not desire to limit its product of iPhone to small demographics, but seek to have as many consumers as possible. From the applications such as time management and productivity, one can figure out that Apple wished to target business consumers such as mangers and entrepreneurs of small scale. While on the other hand, the explosion of games, support of yahoo and Google mail brings the fact to the surface that Apple wants to target the young people as well (Campesato & Nilson, 2010).

From the above facts, it has come to notice that the age group of the target audience of Apple iPhone would range from 15 years to 40 years with an extensive knowledge and know-how of the technology. Since iPhone is an exclusive communication product with relatively high price at the initial stages, thus, they tend to cater the above average social class (upper middle and high class) consumers. However, with passage of time, due to intense competition within the industry, iPhone decreased its price in order to target a wider audience (Campesato & Nilson, 2010).

From the sources, it has also been observed that the users that are dominating in the consumption of iPhone include teenagers and youth (ranging from 15-25 years) that capture the biggest chunk of the consumption market in the home country, even though iPhone initially segmented the young men under 40 years of age (Campesato & Nilson, 2010).

Considering the target audience in the home country, the potential consumers in the foreign market tends to be relatively same that incorporates the young buyers and entrepreneurs, regardless of their gender, ranging from 16-35 years. Moreover, looking at the region of South Asia, the segmentation based on demographics would include the upper middle and upper class consumers (Campesato & Nilson, 2010).

Competitive Analysis

Taking into account the competitive analysis, the major competitors that have been identified in the foreign market of South Asian regions (such as India, Pakistan) includes Samsung Galaxy, HTC, Blackberry and Nokia, which proved Apple iPhone with intense and deep competition (Ferrell & Hartline, 2010).

Since apple iPhone has a narrow product line with high pricing, thus Nokia becomes one of its strongest and biggest competitors due to the reason that Nokia provides its customers with a wide range of product-line with relatively low prices. The emerging markets of South Asia has numerous consumers that are still price conscious and tend to prefer the products that are of lo-ranging (in price) with a variety of product (Ferrell & Hartline, 2010).