Business Fundamentals : Principles of Marketing

Learn how marketing creates value by understanding customer needs, researching markets, and delivering offerings that build profitable relationships. Explore the marketing process, including the marketing mix and digital channels.

Explore marketing management through five orientations—production, product, selling, marketing, and societal marketing—showing how firms understand needs, satisfy customers, and build lasting relationships.

Align strategic planning with marketing initiatives by shaping the corporate vision and portfolio to meet evolving market opportunities, using the BCG matrix and Ansoff’s growth strategies.

Identify your customers through market segmentation and select target markets to create value and profitable relationships. Evaluate segment attractiveness and apply a suitable marketing approach—undifferentiated, differentiated, concentrated, or micro marketing.

Explore how positioning shapes consumer perception and how to use a USP and a perceptual map to differentiate offerings, illustrated by Starbucks and Dunkin.

Develop new products through a thorough eight stage process from idea generation to commercialization, using internal or external sources while managing risk and aligning with the product lifecycle.

Explore the five-stage product life cycle—development, introduction, growth, maturity, and decline—and how sales and investments guide marketing strategy and decisions.

Explore how marketing channels and supply chain management move products from producers to end users through intermediaries, including direct and indirect channels and corporate, contractual, and administered VMS.

Explore personal selling as the promotional mix's interpersonal tool, detailing a seven-step process from prospecting to follow-up, and examine sales promotion with short-term incentives such as coupons and samples.

Explore how the integrated marketing communications strategy unifies promotional messages across channels. Apply the RABOSTIC model—research, audience, budget, objectives, strategies, tactics, implementation, control—and examine Coke's 2011 'Share a Coke'.