Hi all, this will be my final blog post. As the semester ends I reflect on what I have studied and learned thus far over the course of the past several months. In the past I was under the impression that marketing was simply involved one finding a product which one desired to sell, you price it, and you advertise it, then you sell it. Which is essentially marketing. However, I have discovered that you have only begun to examine the aspects involved within each of these steps to marketing.
If you think this chart looks intricate, then you have a lot
to learn about marketing. These are only some of the areas which need to be
focused on when marketing.
Throughout the course we have focused on many terms that
help define the categories within the marketing world. These definitions helped
us understand more about what there are in terms of roles, marketing
strategies, product pricing, placement and much more. Did you know there was a difference between
product place…. and product placement? I didn’t know this before I took this
course.
Product place is
an area in which a product is distributed. We all are aware of what this is:
Convenience stores, department stores, mall, etc.
Product placement
is a strategically placed product which is set, therefore the specific goal is to
advertise for the product. For this to
occur the rights to show the product must be paid for. For example, in movies you may notice a Coca
Cola bottle within the movie with the logo being displayed. This was paid for
by Coca Cola for their product to be shown in the movie.
Have you ever stepped back and really thought about how our
world is built upon marketing? We see thousands of ads each day and we
subconsciously don’t recognize it.
I think marketing is a lot more in depth than we tend to
think. We need to consider that to market a product you need to have a marketing strategy. This is a plan you set in order to achieve
your goals. Your goals also can come in different sectors as well, categorized
as primary goals and secondary goals.
There are so many ways in which marketing can be done.
Social media is today’s largest contributor to marketing. As we learned in
class, the Internet has found ways to follow you everywhere you go. You can
look up puppies on Amazon and the next thing you know you’re on Facebook and an
Ad for puppies shows up, this is called behavioral
retargeting.
Opinion leaders are a common way that companies market their
product. An opinion leader is a public figure that is used to promote a
product. The idea is, “If the product is good enough for ________ then it must
be good enough for me.” They’re often found within sports ads to promote
athletic products.
Lebron James Nike Ad
The idea is to create an ad and product which appeals to
your target market. By doing so you
create a customer product which people desire.
The basis we focused on were the Four P’s of marketing, Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. These
four points were how many of our group based projects were run. We had several presentations in class in which
we had to inform the class and analyze an Ad or idea regarding marketing in
which we applied the four P’s to explain our point. These helped us analyze our
topic and explain it to the rest of the class.
We learned how to apply certain formulas to acquire a break-even point, the amount in terms
of money that we needed to reach to not lose money. We also learned how to set prices to make
revenue with several other equations. We had a group excel project in which we
analyzed a company versus the industry and determined the break-even points and
amounts of revenue, then analyzed the success rate for each.
We used all the knowledge we obtained during the semester to
create, advertise, and successfully orchestrate an event for a charity
organization of our choice. We soon found out how teamwork is also a key factor
in marketing along with knowing how to efficiently utilize all of the knowledge
learned from studying marketing.
There is so much more to learn about marketing. The industry
is ever changing, so as marketers it is our job to utilize our knowledge and
keep up to date on the world changing around us. Marketing is everywhere and
it’s a part of our everyday lives.
