Marketing strategy and implementation approaches

¶ … role of marketing targeting and positioning in an organization's marketing strategy.

In order for any company to execute its marketing strategies successfully, the traditional aspects of product, price, promotion and place or distribution need to be thoroughly communicated throughout the product launch and sales teams. These four factors are commonly known of as the 4 Ps of marketing and serve as the foundation for all marketing activity. The role of marketing targeting is the definition of the audience of potential customers defined within a broader customer segment. Marketing targeting is a precise definition of the potential customers for the product, their unmet needs and why the product(s) and service(s) being offered will be relevant to them, existing substitute products these potential customers are using today, and increasingly, how they define themselves in the context of comparable people (or groups) as well. This last area is known of as psychographics, and is becoming increasingly used for fine-tuning marketing strategies so that messaging for products and services aligns with how potential customers see themselves, and psychographics is the study of how people assign themselves to groups, over and above their demographics characteristics of age, gender, region of the country they live in, or any number of other demographic variables. The marketing targeting combines all these demographic and psychographic factors to define the target market, and within that segment, the target audience for a product or service. Companies are increasingly focusing research of unmet needs to ensure their messaging and products stay highly relevant to potential customers' needs.

Where marketing targeting concentrates on defining the target market and the most probable audience of potential customers, positioning refers to the messaging and hopefully highly differentiated set of benefits both a company overall and its products and services deliver. The Apple iPod's positioning as a portable MP3 player that is easily loaded with songs from iTunes shows the positioning of making a relatively complex product easy to use and capable of delivering benefits instantaneously. Apple's positioning of the iPod has been very successful due to the fact that substitute products were either not as compatible with the large repositories of MP3 songs online to the magnitude of iTunes, or second, were not that easy to use. Apple's positioning then with the iPods is to continually drive down costs while increasing value, a classic product strategy from the high tech industry. The sophistication yet ease of use of iTunes solidifies Apple's positioning as the pre-eminent, easiest to use, and most in-demand personal MP3 player available today. Positioning is the definition of the unique value proposition of a product, and increasingly these value propositions are benefits based, rarely are they features or price-based today with the exception of Wal-Mart, whose unique value proposition is selling purely on price.

Q: Many popular forecasting techniques draw from past experience and historical data. Discuss some of the more important problems that may occur in using these methods.

First, using forecasting techniques that draw from historical data has the implicit assumption that the patterns of the past will repeat themselves in the future. From nonparametric forecasting techniques where nominal or interval level data is used to parametric statistical routines that rely on ratio-level data, the same fact remains that past data is often no predictor of future trends. Second, historical data is often collected for a specific analytical purpose, and it is often used out of the original context for which it was originally created. Third, there really isn't any way to validate if the historical data has a robust enough methodology to be interval-level or ratio-level data that is suitable for more advanced parametric statistical techniques. Fourth, at best using these techniques that are based on past data provide a glimpse of only the current situation and do not extrapolate well into the future without additional forecast-based variables to guide the analysis. In summary, there are many problems using forecasting methods based on historical data and the results typically must be corroborated across multiple data sources.