Marketing and competition

A lecture on marketing and competition from a course on enterprize.

1. Marketing and competition Enterprise week 6

2. Introduction revisiting the proposal Who is you target customer? Is it a business or individual? Demographic details – age, gender, etc… Their lifestyle / interests? Spend 2 minutes describing your ideal customer. Try to draft a customer sketch / short description of the person you would be the best customer.

3. Competition The results of your research: Who are your competitors? What products / services do they sell? How much do they charge? What is the USP of their products? Are they after exactly the same customer as you? If not what is different. If yes what is there about your product that would make the customer buy your product and not theirs?

4. Marketing In its simplest form marketing is about making sure your potential customers know about your product and know how to buy it. It is often reduced to ensuring that you know the answer to the 4Ps: Product : What are you going to sell? Price : How much can you charge for your product? Place : Where will people buy your product? Promotion : How will people find out about your product?

5. Product What are you going to sell? In order to ensure that what you are selling will actually sell you must understand your target customer's needs and then tailor your product to meet those needs. The more you are able to fulfil your customers' expectations, the better the chances that they will buy from you, recommend you to others and come back again in the future. This will involved identifying you ideal customer (which we did last time) and then ensuring that the product will match their needs. This is done through the second stage of market research, the focus groups.

6. Price How much can you charge for your product? The price that you charge will influence the number of sales and the amount sold. If your price it too low, it may appear that the product is of lower quality or you may simply make too little profit. If your price it too high, customers may buy fewer items or in smaller quantities. To determine the right price, you should consider: The cost of developing the product (including direct cost of inputs and overhead costs) The price established by the competition The amount customers are willing to pay or can afford to pay for your product

7. Place Where will people buy your product? Place refers to both where you are going to sell your product and how you are going to distribute it. Are you going to sell your product directly to the end consumer yourself or will you sell to wholesalers or retailers who will sell it for you? If you do sell it yourself, will you be selling over the Internet, by mail or from a physical location? Is the location you've chosen a good fit with where your target customer shops?

8. Promotion How will people find out about your product? For people to buy your product, they need to be aware of it, have a positive impression of it, and be convinced that they need or want it. The message must reach the right people - advertising that reaches anybody but the person who is interested in buying your product (or will be influenced by them) is wasted advertising.

9. Advertising A basic advert  consists of a message that alerts your customer to your product and persuades them to buy it over your competitors. This is not necessarily done in a single communication and their might be a whole chain of adverts that link together to do this task.

10. Media match You need to decide what form of media will help you reach your prospective clients / ideal customers and what message you will send to them. Media selection is tricky and is very tied up with the media channels your target audience consumes.

11. Choosing the right channel to reach your potential customers Start by thinking what media / information channels your ideal customer uses. Also they may be exposed to advertising external to media channels. How do they spend the time and what information channels do they use encounter. Identify all the media channels and forms of advertising they may be exposed to.

12. Inserting adverts into this space Advertising is the insertion of you message into their space. It might be space based advertising or media based. Identify types that may be appropriate.

13. Message Once you have a medium you need a message. This is tied to your brand and is a persuasion to buy. Ideas?

14. Creating the adds The format of your advertising space has conventions you need to understand. You need to make your advert hit these.

15. How much will it cost? How much will putting your message out there cost? Might be cheap is a sign post for a coffee shop or might be expensive for TV campaign…