Complete Beginner's Introduction to Marketing

1. Course Intro: What is marketing? If you're like me, you probably just think that marketing is nothing but developing advertisements or maybe high pressured sales calls. But in reality, marketing covers so much more than that. Marketing is an entire spectrum of activities that encompasses everything from designing a product that meets a customer's need, to marketing that product, to closing the deal, and then even providing follow up service. And learning when we can improve the product or when we should drop the product from our lineup. Marketing is an absolutely huge field, and all of the different resources in marketing, textbooks and courses can seem a little bit overwhelming. My goal in this course isn't to make you a Phd marketing specialist, rather my goal is to present the key topics of marketing. The things that you're most likely to hear in a marketing course or if you're considering a career in marketing. In this course, we're going to break things down. Nice and simple. I will present the key topics along with plenty of examples so you can understand the fundamentals of marketing. I sincerely hope that you find this course useful. With that being said, let's go ahead and start learning. 2. What Is Marketig?: I think the best place to start a course on marketing is by asking ourselves what even is marketing? And as you can see in this definition, marketing is the process of creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers. Now, there's two key things that I want to point out about this definition. The first is that this definition of marketing goes far beyond what most people think of marketing. I know that before I started studying marketing, I thought that marketing was just coming up with advertisements or billboards, or maybe promotions. But as we can see here, there is so much more involved than that. For example, creating an offering encompasses everything from doing research to determine what products and features customers want, to determining whether or not we can actually build that product. We have to communicate the offering to customers. Which is a little bit more in line with the traditional idea of marketing. If we're just thinking of advertising and then we've ultimately got to deliver that product. We've got to get it through our distribution channels to the customer so that we can create an exchange of value. So the first thing that I would like you to know in this course is that marketing is so much more than just simple advertising. The second thing I would like to point out is that all of these words are verbs. They are action words. We are doing something, creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging in a number of textbooks. I'm actually seeing this definition pop up if you have looked at some previous textbooks, or if you have prior experience with marketing, you're more than likely to hear something known as the four Ps of marketing, which stands for Product Place, Price and Promotion. And this is a very traditional framework of things that we should think about when it comes to marketing. And obviously, we can see there is a lot of overlap between the four Ps and the definition that I gave you. So we obviously have product that aligns with creating from our framework. We have promotion again, which would align, perhaps with communicating that value. So regardless of which framework that you use, there is a lot of overlap. But especially in some textbooks, I am seeing a movement towards this action model of marketing, creating, communicating, exchanging, and delivering value. If you're someone that studies marketing or if you're working on a paper for marketing, I think it's beneficial to understand both of these frameworks. In the upcoming videos, we're going to go more into depth into each of the components of these different frameworks and see how that plays out in a real context. So I hope you found this introductory video useful and I will see you in the next one. 3. SWOT Matrix and Porter's Five Forces: Hello everyone, and welcome back. As you probably noticed from the previous lesson, marketing encompasses a lot of different things. Creating value, exchanging value, delivering value, and then communicating that value proposition to the client. So there's a lot of stuff involved in marketing, and unless we have a solid plan, it's going to be easy for us to get overloaded and not really have a methodical way of going about this. I would like to introduce you to the strategic planning process. Now, this all starts with a situation analysis. Where are we as a business? Where are we in terms of our competitors, the regulatory environment? Right? Because all of these things are going to determine what products we can offer, what we're allowed to offer, how we're allowed to run advertisements and promotions. Then we also have to ensure that whatever products that we are marketing align with our mission as a company. And from there, we can create specific objectives. Now in this course, we're not really going to talk about the mission or objectives, because those are things that are going to be determined by the company outside of the marketing process. We will, however, talk about the value proposition and strategy formulation, because those are both going to be really important to us. Now let's go ahead and start off with the situation analysis. When we're thinking of us as a business, we want to understand where we are in relation to our competitors. Where we are in relation to other firms in the market. A bunch of different things. So one of the things that we're going to learn about is understanding the competitive environment. And there's really two different types of competition that we have to be aware of when it comes to marketing. The first is direct competition. If I am Oscar Meyer and I'm trying to sell you my hot dog, I'm a direct competitor to a different company that also sells hot dogs. On the flip side, we also have indirect competition. So if I sell hot dogs, you might not even want hot dogs at all. Maybe hamburgers are an indirect competitor. So it's important that we understand as we're developing these products, who are we competing against, both directly and indirectly? And one thing that can be especially helpful for understanding our environment that we are operating in relative to our competitors is the Swat. This is one of the most classic templates that you're going to see in any kind, of course related to business. It comes up in management, it comes up in business administration, it comes up in marketing. This is probably one of the most important matrixes for you to understand. What this does is it stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And it's divided into strengths, weaknesses, and then internal and external. When we're thinking about our internal systems, we want to consider our strengths before we even begin designing a product or begin offering a product on the market. What are we good at? Are we a car company that really has a lot of cool technology? Customers come to us because they love how we have navigation systems, hands free driving. We have all of these things in the car. What are our strengths? Keep in mind these are things internal to the company. Just as we have strength, we're also going to have internal weaknesses. Maybe we don't have that great of quality control. Maybe we issue a lot of defective products. Or maybe our cost of production is significantly higher than our competitors. And we want to have an idea of those strengths and weaknesses because it's going to impact what types of products that we offer. Also, we want to consider the external environment. What are the opportunities out there outside of our specific firm, right? So our strengths are what we as a company do. Well, external opportunities are what is consumer demand like? Are consumers getting more of a preference for the kind of products that we offer? Maybe there are economic incentives. Maybe the government is offering a tax credit for purchasing vehicles that use rechargeable batteries, right? Renewable energy, things like that. We also want to consider the threats. Again, threats are things not internal to our business, but external coming from the outside. So what are our competitors doing? Is there regulation that might hinder our products? So maybe we make hummers, right? And in the past they get 3 miles per gallon. I'm exaggerating, and the government says, hey, you have to have all new vehicles at least 20 miles per gallon, right? Anything like that, that impacts us as a business we need to be aware of. And the Swat template is a great example for conceptualizing some of these things. Specifically when it comes to competitors. Another model that you absolutely need to be familiar with is the Five Forces Model. This helps us to understand the five different forces that can affect us when we are trying to develop and offer these new products on the market to compete out there for the consumers dollar. The first is competitive rivalry. Do we have direct competitors? We have Ford, we have Chevy, we have Pepsi, we have Coke. Right? These are direct competitors, and we want to keep that in mind when we're thinking about these products. We also want to consider buyers power. Now, there's entire courses devoted to market structure, but one of the things that you'll learn is when there is a single buyer for a product, that buyer has a ton of power. Because if they say no to your product, you go out of business. Now, in most markets there's not a single buyer for our product. But if we sell to thousands or hundreds or millions of customers, each customer has substantially less buying power then if we only sell to three or four key distributors. Right, so that's something for us to keep in mind. Another thing that we want to consider is the supplier power. If we are developing these new products and we have to purchase components from a supplier, maybe we make computers and we can only purchase CPU's from one of two manufacturers. Right? Each of those suppliers has a lot of power. When we are developing and creating our products, we have to keep in mind that if the supplier changes their mind or raises their prices, there's very little that we're going to be able to do with that, and we've got to figure that into our calculations. Also, we want to keep in mind substitutes. This is the example that I was giving you earlier with the hot dogs and hamburgers. If we are selling hot dogs, we've got to keep in mind that people can easily switch over to hot dogs if we have coffee and tea. Right? Anything that people can substitute, the more substitutes there are for our product, that gives us relatively less power. That doesn't mean we shouldn't produce the product, it's just something that we need to keep in mind. And then also we have new firms coming into the market. So not only do we have existing competitors, but we have to consider how easy is it for new competitors to enter the market. If it's hard, then we can say, okay, we've just got to compete against these two or three firms. If it's easy, we've always got to be aware of new competitors coming into the market. So that's just a very general overview of some of the factors that we should consider when we are assessing the internal and external environment. Obviously, there are countless factors you could consider, legal risk, you could consider social trends, economic events. Literally any single variable goes into this analysis. But the goal of this course isn't to overload you with 1,000 different definitions of the same thing. The goal of this course is to give you the frameworks and the templates that are the most commonly used, the ones that you're most likely to run into. And for that I would say the two that you want to be aware of is Porter's Five Forces Model as well as the Swat Matrix ICD's in almost any kind of a business course. So I think it's well worth your time to understand them. I hope you found the video useful and I will see you in the next one. 4. Boston Consulting Group Matrix: Hello everyone and welcome back. In today's video, we're going to be talking about a firm's portfolio of products. Because more often than not, a firm produces more than a single product. And how that product is doing really depends on what they're going to do with that. Are we going to keep pouring money into this product or is it something we are going to drop from our lineup? So the key idea here is that different products will require different planning strategies for marketing. Depending on low or high growth and their percent of the market share. Again, goal of this course is to make things simple. I'm going to share with you the Boston Consulting Group matrix, which again, is one of the more common that you're going to find in business textbooks. The question here is, what do we do with a specific product when it comes to marketing that product? And not every product is going to be treated the same. This is broadly divided into four main categories. Is the product have a high or low percentage of total market share? Is the industry, or that category as a whole, experiencing low or slow growth or fast growth, I guess we should say With that, what I want to do is start with the easy ones. If we have a product that falls into this category, it is easy for us as a marketing manager because we know what we've got to do and that is the cash cows. These are your products that are in a market. You have a high percentage of the market. I'm just going to make up an example here. Suppose we are a computer manufacturer. No, let's rewind. Let's go back and suppose we are a DVD manufacturer and we have 95% of the market share. We don't need to do a whole lot of advertising because we already own that market. At the same time, DVD's are rapidly going out of fashion. People are going to Netflix, they're going to streaming services. If we spend a lot of money here, it's not really going to change anything. We're already the leader. We're not going to spend enough money to convince people to stay with DVD's and not go to streaming. So if we have a product that falls into that category, we're just going to let it go. We're going to continue getting the money from that product, but we're not going to spend a ton of our marketing budget because we're already the leader and there's really no room for growth. The second category that's easy for us as a marketing manager is the stars. These are the products that have a high growth rate. And the products where we have a large percent of the market share. Let's suppose go back ten years ago. 15 years ago, when the ipod comes out, right? Apple has a huge market share, right? They're the first one coming out with this. And then on top of that, the category as a whole is experiencing rapid growth. These are the things that we want to protect them at all costs because we are the leader and we know this product category is just going to get more and more cash for us over the coming years. The stars, we want to invest heavily in them. We want to be protecting our market share. We want to be taking advantage of all of these growth opportunities. Now those are the easy ones. As a marketing manager, it can be a little bit harder for us when it comes to the dogs. These are the products that no one wants to really admit they have as a company. No company wants to say, we are losing in this market and there's no potential for growth. Let's go back to the DVD example. In the previous we had a cash cow. We had 95% market share. Now we've got 5% market share and the product category is just dying. So there's really no reason spending money or even trying to keep up this product line. It's better off for us just to get rid of it, to divest it, to use a marketing term, and move on to something better. Now, one of the hardest ones is the question marks. These are the products where we don't really have a huge market share, but it is in a high growth field. So let's suppose it's some kind of artificial intelligence, right? Artificial intelligence right now is growing off the charts. Or if you want to think back a couple of years ago, things like cryptocurrencies, right? They were growing off the charts and we don't have a huge market share. We are not convincingly winning over customers. But if we could, if we could get that little bit more market share, wow, we could maybe turn this question mark into a store, and these are the hard ones for marketing managers. And there's really no key answer, but we have two broad decisions. The first we say, okay, we're going to go all in, We are going to try and turn this from a question mark into a store. The second option, we say, look, it's going to cost us too much to try to win here we can either harvest, which is just kind of gradually reducing our exposure to the product, still getting the cash that we have, or we can just completely divest and get rid of it. So as a marketing manager, everyone wants to think their products are the stars. But in reality, we need to take a look at where we stand with regards to market share and the growth of the industry, because that's going to determine how we market and how we invest in that product. And as you can see here, I just put a quick little cheat sheet for you so that you can kind of see what the specific marketing strategy for each of those products would be. Question marks, we are either double or nothing, right? We're going all in or we're getting out the dogs. We should just be cutting them. But in reality, most managers, they're going to have the sunk cost fallacy. They're going to say, we've already put so much money in this. If we don't keep putting more money in it, we're just basically losing out, right? It's hard to make that decision to cut off a product line. But that's generally speaking, not always. That's generally the best strategy for the dogs. The stars, we are investing in them. We are promoting the distribution and then the cash towels, we're just gathering that money, it's just coming in and we're spending it on other products such as the stars. So that's just an overview of the Boston Consulting Group matrix. Again, this is something that's super popular. Any kind of business marketing textbook, you're going to find it. So again, this is one, if you have a class on marketing or you're getting ready for an interview for a marketing position, something like this is definitely what you might want to have in your mind, at least as far as strategies when it comes to marketing different types of products. So I hope you found the video useful I'll see in the next one. 5. Developing a Marketing Plan: Hello everyone and welcome back. In today's video, we're going to be talking about the marketing plan for specific products. Now let's take a look at how we can think about this. So when we think of all the different products that we have as a company, we can broadly divide the market into a couple different segments. On the one hand, we have existing markets, This is places where we as a company are already selling things. And then we have new markets. Places where we are not currently selling our products, but maybe we could in the future. And then we have our existing product lineup. The things that we're already producing and things that we might want to produce in the future. When it comes to existing products, let's think about existing products in existing markets, right? If I am Mcdonald's, I'm basically selling hamburgers all over the world, right? I have an existing product in an existing market. My goal here is really on penetrating the market, getting more market share. I don't need to worry about expanding to other places because there's nowhere for me to expand, right? So if I was thinking about a product as a marketing manager, I know that I have already expanded everywhere I want to expand. I don't want to launch a new product. I'm going to be focusing on getting more market share. On the flip side, we have an existing product, something that's doing really well. Let's say in the United States, we have a certain grocery store and it's doing really well. We think this grocery store might do well in Canada or Mexico, right? They're both relatively close to the United States, especially When it comes to Canada, we have a common language, so maybe I want to try and move an existing product into a new market. The strategy here then is on market development, right? I'm trying to create a market where one doesn't already exist, but let's put existing products out of the picture. Because remember, marketing isn't just about advertising existing products, it's also about creating new products that align with what the customer wants. Let's suppose we have a new product inside of an existing market. Again, I'm a grocery chain in the United States, and I don't want to go to Canada. I don't want to go to Mexico. But I want to do something different. This is where product development comes into play. I should be thinking, what are the other offerings available out there? What can I give customers that they don't already have? We'll talk about product development in the next lesson. It's a really cool thing. It's one of my favorite topics, but we will come back to that. And then lastly, we have new products and new markets. This is where we as a company were saying, you know what, We want to get into something completely different, right? So maybe we are a grocery store, we want to get into an oil change business, right? We're like, yeah, let's get some of those express oil changes, right? We already know how to set up services, we already know how to hire employees, right? We have this infrastructure, we've got distributors, maybe that's what we want to do, right? So that's the general idea of your marketing plan. The key takeaway here as you're coming up with a marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy for your product is going to depend on whether this is an existing product or a new product and whether it is a new market or an existing market. So a couple key things to keep in mind there. I hope you found the video useful and I will see in the next one. 6. Developing an Offering: Hello everyone, and welcome back to one of my favorite lessons in the entire course that is developing and managing new offerings. Now if you're looking at this and you're saying, wait a minute, developing a new product that has nothing to do with marketing. This is why I like this lesson so much because it really shows how marketing is integrated into every aspect of the business, including the product development. If you remember from the previous video, we were talking about how sometimes companies have an existing market. They're doing really well, but they want to launch a new product. What's a way that they can go about this that makes sense? That is a logical way. The first thing is to generate ideas. We want to ask ourselves, what do customers not have access to? What are customers telling us they wish we had? What is something that we think could be beneficial for a customer? We're going to come up with a ton of different ideas. Then we're going to start screening those ideas. We're going to be asking ourselves which of these is possible for us as a company to produce. We're going to do that market research. What do customers realistically want, right? We're going to start filtering out these ideas. And eventually we're going to come down to the product or service idea that we decide we want to offer. And then in that next phase, we're going to specify the features. Let's suppose that we think customers want a new kind of computer and it's something that's not really offered on the market. Well, we want to say, what can this computer do? How is it going to stand out from its competitors? We're going to make a list of the specific features of that product. And then we need to actually go and develop that product. We need to put it together. We need to set up the infrastructure, we need to start producing that product. And then we're going to test that product. And this is where marketing comes into play because we're going to see how our customers react to this product. We're going to do focus groups. Do they like this product? Is this product being rejected by the market? We're going to take the results of that testing and we're going to adapt if we need to. Right? Again, this is why having the marketing team involved is so important. We can see how the test market reacts. We can make those changes. And then we can go to full product launch again, because marketing has been involved with this product from the very beginning. When we go to launch that product, they're going to know how this product stacks up. They're going to be able to articulate its features to the customers and then we're going to evaluate that product. Remember about two lessons ago, I think it was two or three videos ago? We talked about the different product categories and I said we had the stars, which are the products that are doing amazing. We had the dogs, which are the products that no one really wants to admit, but every company has them. We're going to evaluate this product. How is this product doing? Do we need to pour money into it? Or is it something that we just need to cut our losses? Again, those are the seven steps of developing a product offering. I hope you found the video useful and I will see in the next one. 7. Consumer Decision Process: Righty, we are making some progress in the course on marketing. We have already learned how to create a new product, and now it's time for us to market that product to customers. In this video, I'm going to give you probably two or three key ideas of what we should think about when it comes to consumer behavior and decision making. So let's go ahead and jump right in. From a marketing perspective, we need to be aware of the different stages of buying that go on in a customer's mind. So the first thing a customer does, they recognize they have some kind of a need. Maybe they're standing in line and they see our chewing gum while they're waiting to pay at the cashier. Maybe they recognize that their roof is leaking and they need us to come repair the roof. Whatever the case is, the first stage, if a customer doesn't know they have a need, they're not going to search for a product. Once they do start searching for a product or service, that is the second stage of the process. After they are searching, they're going to compare and evaluate the options before they make a decision and purchase. Then they use and evaluate that product and ultimately dispose of that product. Now this is a customer's thought process. These are the stages a customer goes through when they are buying. The question I have for you is, which stage should the marketing team play a role? The answer is that the marketing team plays a role in every single stage of this process. Let's take a look at recognizing a need. There's probably products or services that you had no idea you needed until you were on Amazon and a product was suggested to you, or you were watching TV and you saw an advertisement for a vacation. And then you realized, yeah, it's been five years since I went on vacation. Marketing can help a consumer to recognize a need for a product. It can definitely help them when it comes to searching for a product, right? So we can give them advertisements, we can do sponsored links on search engines. Right? All of these different things to make sure when they're searching for a product that ours is at least on their radar. But it's not enough to just get our product on their radar. We have got to show all of the different things that our product excels at. Right, all of the different ways why having our product will make the customer's life better. So marketing again comes into comparing and evaluating these options. The decision and purchase, that goes without saying, we're really trying to close that sale. And then even when it comes to use and evaluation, the marketing team is playing a role. They're getting that consumer feedback. They're saying, what are customers liking? What are customers not liking? What do we need to do differently or keep the same in future iterations of this product? And then even coming down to the disposal of the product, you might be thinking the customer is throwing my product in the trash. What does that have to do with marketing? Well, let's suppose instead of throwing that product in the trash, we have a green marketing outreach where as part of our efforts to be more sustainable, brand ourselves as socially responsible in the mind of the consumer, we have some kind of recycling program so the consumer doesn't have to throw away their product. Speaking of consumer decisions, when it comes to making these purchases, we want to be aware that consumers are generally going to have two types of purchases, low involvement purchases and high involvement purchases. When it comes to low involvement purchases, these are things that a customer is in the grocery store line, They see a magazine and they purchase it because it's there, it's two or three bucks and they don't care. These are routine purchases, right? I know every month I'm going to get more soap or every week I'm going to get more groceries, right? High involvement purchases are things that require detailed analysis and comparison, right? If I'm buying a new vehicle for most people that is a major purchase, Something they're going to spend at least a couple days, probably weeks or months considering, right? So marketing is going to play a role in both of these purchasing decisions, but it's going to manifest in different ways. If it's a low impulse by our thing is going to be getting that product in front of the consumer. Showing them here I am, buy me. I can make your life better. If it's more of a high involvement decision, it might be more of a more gradual approach. We're going to have to provide maybe more detailed information. We might have to do things a little bit differently. But regardless of whether a consumer is making an impulse purchase or a vacation trip that they're going to spend weeks planning, we need to make sure that we are appropriately marketing that to them. I think this lesson has already went long enough. So I'm going to take a little break here. We will come back in the next one and we're going to talk about situational factors as well as physiological and psychological factors that can impact a consumer's decision. So I hope you found this video useful and I will see in the next one. 8. Consumer Decision Process Pt2: Everyone and welcome back. In today's video, we are continuing talking about consumer behavior when it comes to us attempting to market our products. The last video was getting a little bit long, so we're just picking up where we left off, talking about situational factors. These are things that are not related to our specific product, but rather the environment in which we are selling it. So if you remember when we were talking at the beginning of the video, the four piece of marketing, one of them was place. And you can see here that place or situational factors do have a role to play. Now this can be anything as we're thinking of marketing our product to the customer. We want to think, what kind of customer are we marketing to? What kind of image are we trying to portray, right? So some of the things we might want to consider are lights, smells, music. Right? If we are marketing a product to perhaps an older generation, right? We are going to have very different music in our store. Then if we're trying to market the product to new college grads, they are just trendy, right? It's going to be a different set up, the same when it comes to lights, right? If I'm marketing for people that love going out and partying and going to raves and stuff like that. I'm going to have the flashy lights, I'm going to have the strobes on. The flip side, if I'm marketing to people that don't do that, that find that obnoxious, then I'm not going to want to have those same things. Also, things that are completely outside of our control still play a role. The social situation, the time of the day, whether it is morning, afternoon, evening, all of these things, even a customer's mood can come into their decision whether or not to purchase our product. We also have personal factors. You may have heard of the big five personality traits. Things like a customer's agreeableness, their openness to new experiences, their conscientiousness, right? We want to understand, when we are marketing these products, who are our customers? If our customers are very conscientious, they want to do the right thing. Maybe we, as a marketing team, highlight the environmental impact of our product, how it is better than our competitors. If our customers are very open to new experiences, maybe we highlight the fact that this product is new. That they will be a trend setter by using this product. Gender, self, concept, age, right? All of these things impact how we market the product. The key thing here, we need to know who our customer is. And then we need to market effectively based on their characteristics when it comes to marketing our products. We also need to understand what needs are we fulfilling for our customers. And there's something known as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which in its simplified form, basically says that everyone has different needs. We have physiological needs, right? So things that we literally cannot survive without. So food, water, shelter, all of these things. We have the need for safety, social acceptance, self esteem, and self actualization. And if you look around at all of the different products that exist, think about them and you'll notice that each of them serves a different need. If we are a grocery store, we are obviously fulfilling a very direct need, people need to eat. If we're selling deodorant, people don't necessarily need deodorant. But it's pretty important from a social perspective, right? So when we are marketing these products to our customers, we want to have an idea what need are we satisfying and tailor our marketing efforts to that need. I'll give you an example. Let's suppose that we are a sports stadium and we are trying to market tickets for not just any seat but the top tier, the sky box, Right? The most best seats in the entire stadium. When we're marketing this to people, are we going to try and convince them that being in the sky box is going to keep them from starving? No, it doesn't make sense. Are we going to convince them that it's safer than being in the front row? Well, maybe more than likely though. We're going to be using the social aspect of this. We're going to say, look, this is exclusive, this is a status symbol. Everyone's going to literally be looking up to you in the sky box, right? So the important thing is to understand what need we're satisfying, because that's going to determine how we market the product. Just to give you a couple more things that should influence our marketing efforts are societal factors. In the United States and virtually everywhere around the world, we not only have cultures, but various subcultures. These are segments of the population that have a common identity around some kind of belief or practice, and they represent a valuable avenue for marketing. I'll give you an example. Think of all the different restaurants we have out there. And then think of vegan restaurants, right? These are restaurants that are marketing to a specific subculture, people that follow the vegan lifestyle. Think of clothing stores, right? We have places like Hot Topic that cater to Goth or Punk, right? These are all different avenues where we can market our product. Taking into account the subculture that we are marketing to. We obviously have class is a huge social factor, or a societal factor, I should say. People that fall into different levels of income tend to drive specific levels of cars, right? So if we look at someone who doesn't have a lot of income at all, they might not have a car. Someone that is extremely wealthy, right? Someone that is born into wealth, they might be driving a Bentley. Someone that's a blue collar worker, right? They might have a Honda, a Toyota. So as someone that's doing marketing, if we know that we are Mercedes, we know that we're Bentley, right? Our advertising is going to portray a different lifestyle, a different vibe than if we're trying to market a Honda, right? It's not saying that one car is better than another, it's just saying we need, again, the key thing you'll hear throughout this course. We need to understand who our consumer is, what they want, and then market to them in a way that appeals to them. Someone that's in the market for a Bentley. They want that prestige, right? They want that tradition. They want that exquisite. They want that exclusivity, right? Someone maybe that wants a Honda or a Toyota. We're looking for reliable. We're looking for dependable, we're looking maybe for safety affordability, right? So if you try and sell me a Bentley, I'm not going to be interested. Likewise, someone that owns a Bentley is more than likely not going to be in the market for a Toyota. So those are just a couple factors. As with everything else, there's literally infinite factors that could go into a customer's purchasing decision, but these are some of the big ones. I hope you found the video useful and I'll see you in the next one. 9. Sales Funnel Explained: After we have delivered our message, designed our product and run our advertising at some point. The final goal of marketing is to make the sale. And in the next two lessons, we're going to be talking about two very closely related parts of the sales process. The first that we'll talk about is something known as the marketing funnel that describes how a potential customer becomes a customer. And then in the second video, we're going to talk about the individual process of actually making a sale one on one with a customer. So let's go ahead and start off by talking about the big picture of sales. Now as we're thinking about marketing our product, there is an entire world of potential customers out there. And every so often we might get a lead on a potential customer. Now a lead is just someone that we have their contact information. Maybe they put their e mail address or phone number into our website. We have no information about them, hardly at all. Now what we want to do from a marketing perspective is we want to start following up on these leads. Maybe we have an automated system that sends out an e mail and says, hey, you registered on our site, Are you interested in our product? Or maybe we have phone representatives that place outbound calls and say, hey, we noticed that you stopped by our booth and registered at a trade convention. Do you have a couple minutes to talk about our product? At this point, What we're trying to do is gauge, does the person have any interest or not in our product? If we find that they do have interest, if they say yeah, tell me a little bit more about your product At that point. They go from a lead to a prospect, or sorry, a suspect. Now, a suspect is someone that we think might be interested in our product, but simply having interest in the product isn't going to turn them into a customer. So as we go more through this sales funnel from leads to suspect we're trying to convert someone into a prospect and that is someone that has the budget authority, need and time for our product. So let's suppose that you put your e mail address into some college admission website. At that point, you are just a lead. Now, the admissions counselor, they reach out to you and start talking. Are you interested? You have a couple minutes. You say sure you're now a suspect. And then once this admissions counselor, they say, okay, you are a college age adult, right? So you have the authority to make a purchasing decision. You have the budget, right? Maybe you're eligible for student loans, you have the need. You've already told them that you want to expand your skill set and you have the time because you are wanting to go to college within the next six months. You are a prospect. At this point, they are focused on making the sale, turning you from someone who has the ability to make this decision into someone that's actually going to make the decision. So the sales funnel isn't really something that tells you what you have to do at each stage of the marketing process to sell your product. Rather it's a way of thinking, a way of thinking about how we go from the broad general public to slowly but gradually narrowing down our potential customer base, right? From a lead to a suspect, to a prospect and a customer. And the key thing you should understand here is that at each level we lose a lot of people. We're going to get a lot of general contact info. We're going to have a lot of people that are interested in the product but can't afford it or aren't in the market right now. And only a small percentage of those are going to be converted into actual customers. So that's just an overview of the sales funnel. In the next video, we will look at the actual selling process between a potential buyer and a salesperson. An interesting video, so be sure to come back and watch it. 10. Types of Sales Relationships: Hello everyone and welcome back. In today's video, we are talking all about salespeople. These are the foot soldiers, the people on the front lines that are taking all of our product design, all of our marketing, all of our advertising, and selling that product to the customer. So let's take a look at what salespeople do, specifically from a marketing perspective. Remember when we're talking about marketing, we are creating, delivering, communicating, and exchanging value. And salespeople do all of those things. They create value. They show a customer how the product that we're offering, how it aligns with their needs. They also manage relationships. If you buy a new car and there's something wrong with it, more than likely you're not going to call up the engineer that designed your car, but you know the name and you have the business card of the salesperson that sold you that car. You are going to call them up and you're going to let them know that they need to make it right. And this is valuable because it allows the company to give a response to you, to make things right, to maintain their brand image because you have a point of contact. It's also important because the salesperson is a conduit of information. All of these customer complaints, all of the things that they hear good or bad about the product can pass those up the chain. They're kind of an intermediary between the business and the public. So they fulfill a very important role, specifically the role of selling a product. So let's look at the sales process. And the example I'm going to use is of a car dealership. I don't know where you're located, but in the United States, when you go to a car dealership, you definitely know that you are a part of the sales process. Because as soon as your car pulls on the lot, you won't even get out of your car yet. And you will see salespeople slowly converging on you, walking out of seemingly random places. They're going to start coming towards you. This is the initial approach. The salesperson is approaching you as a potential customer and then they're going to start asking you questions. So hey, what brings you in today? Are you looking for a new vehicle, right? Or maybe you're just trying to get your oil changed at their service center, But they're going to try and figure out what needs do you have? Do we have something that could fulfill those needs? And let's suppose you say, yeah, my car is kind of old. I'm looking to get a new one. They're going to start asking, okay. Well, do you have anything in mind you say, well, I'm looking for a four door sedan that's good on gas mileage. Then they're going to take what they know about the product line, the needs you have given them, and they are going to present something to you as a customer. And this presentation, they're going to highlight the features that you have said are important. So if you said gas mileage was important, they're going to tell you about the gas mileage. Now at some point in this sales presentation, you may have some objections. You might say, you know, I like this product, but your competitor, they have the same product for $1,000 less, right? Or they offer it in a different color, right, Whatever the case may be. The salesperson then is going to try and resolve those objections. So they're going to say, look, we know that our competitor offers the same truck for $1,000 less, but our gas mileage is 5 miles per gallon better. If you drive the amount of an average American within one year, you will have made back the difference in cost, right? Doesn't matter what the objection is, they're going to give you reasons why it shouldn't be as much of a consideration and attempt to sell you the product, which is the closing stage. After they have resolved your objections, the salesperson is going to get you to sign on the dotted line to close that deal. And even after this is complete, they're going to continue providing service. Especially if we are someone that sells software as a service, right? We might have to have our clients call us up and ask to troubleshoot the software, right? So the key thing, and this isn't a sales course obviously, but salespeople are essential to the marketing process, because look at each of these different stages. They all align with one of the goals of the marketing process. So identifying the needs, right? That can help us later on learn to create products with more value. The presentation, right, that's presenting our offering, that aligns perfectly with the communicating value in our marketing framework. And then providing that ongoing service gives us an opportunity to keep our brand image strong in the customer's mind. Right? Not only are they satisfied with the product, but every single time they call us, we have an opportunity to demonstrate that we are committed to giving them that ongoing support. And then just very briefly, I want to talk a little bit about the different types of sales relationships because it does affect how we market our products. Now, on the far left hand side, we have transactional sales relationships. This is when the customer simply wants a product. We have it. There is no ongoing commitment here. So think about, you're going across the country, you stop into a gas station because you need a soft drink. You're never going to see that gas station again, right? That's an example of a transactional sales relationship. So with transactional sales relationships, we're not really doing a whole lot to get customer loyalty, right? They have a need, we have the product, we're going to sell it to them. We also have a functional relationship. That's where you've established a little bit of a routine. Maybe every week you shop for your groceries at the same store. As long as the store doesn't do anything to make you upset, you're probably going to keep going there over and over again again as long as they don't mess anything up because you've already established a routine. You know, they have decent prices and a good selection. Moving on, we have an affiliate relationship and this is where you really start to see a working together, more of a focus on developing a relationship. So with an affiliate relationship, we're selling something. The customer really trusts our expertise, right? Maybe this is a lawyer, maybe this is an accountant, maybe this is a physician. Right? Someone that you want to develop a relationship with. So marketing these services, we're really going to demonstrate that trust. Demonstrate that commitment to the customer's best interests. And then lastly, we have a strategic relationship, this is where we are fully partners in this. Typically, think of this in something like a business to business transaction, right? Suppose that I make computers, I have another business that makes the components that go inside those computers. And we're working together saying, look, I want to sell more computers, you want to sell more components. If you could design a component that does X, Y, and Z, I think it would sell a lot of computers. Therefore, I would have to buy a lot of products from you. Right. So there's a synergistic relationship between those two. But the main point again of this video was just to cover the sales process and to help you understand that at each stage of the sales process, marketing comes into play. So I hope you found the video useful and I will see in the next one. 11. Customer Loyalty: Hello everyone and welcome back. In today's video, we are talking about customer loyalty and satisfaction. And before we talk specifics, I want you to just think of some of the general loyalty programs that you've heard of. I know there was a local gas station in my hometown where every time you would come in to buy a gallon of milk, they would give you a little stamp on a card. And then when you get ten gallons, you get the next one free, right? So the idea here is we want to give consumers an incentive to keep coming back. Now that incentive can be with our specific company, so we're giving a discount for their tenth purchase. It can also be cross promotional. You see a lot of companies sometimes do this, so for example, if you have triple A, maybe you also get a discount on hotel or maybe you get a discount on auto insurance. Right? The cool thing about these cross promotional programs is that it helps to maintain loyalty for your company, but it can also introduce customers from the other company as well. Right? So a little bit of cross over there. We can get more customers. They can get more customers. Again, a mutual benefit. But let's go ahead and talk about the marketing effects of loyalty programs. When we look at the effects of loyalty programs, we can really break this down into four categories. The first is a longevity benefit, right? If a customer trust us, if they have an established relationship with us, it's going to increase the lifetime value of that customer instead of buying Toshiba computers for five years. If I really love Toshiba computers and I buy them for the next 15 years, my value as a customer to that company has substantially increased. Not only that, but it can have a spreading effect. If again, I love Toshiba computers, I've owned the same one for 15 years and I've never had a single problem with it. I'm going to tell people about it, I'm going to brag about that. Product free advertising for the company, loyalty programs can also have a little bit of a blocker effect. So let's suppose that I have been with the same insurance company, and because of that, they give me a loyalty benefit and I get in the mail a flyer that says save 5% on your auto insurance. In my mind, I'm going to be less likely to consider that competitors offering because I already know I have a relationship with my insurance provider. I'm going to say, yeah, I could save 5% but I don't know how they're going to treat me if they actually have to pay a claim. I don't know if this is just a teaser rate. And then lastly, we have acceleration. So not only do loyalty programs help to retain customers, but they can actually increase the amount that customers spend. So if you have some kind of a rewards card and you get rewards every $1,000 you spend. Credit cards are really big like this, right? You'll get a credit card and it says get $100 if you spend $5,000 in a year. If you are at $4,800 you're going to spend that extra 200 to get your reward, right. The same thing like I was telling you about with the gallon of milk program. If I go to the store and I'm at nine gallons of milk, why not just go ahead and buy the extra gallon so I can get my free gallon right there? So the effects of loyalty programs from a marketing perspective are huge. They increase the value of our customers within the firm. They make them less likely to switch to competitors. They're free advertising, and they can increase sales as well. So incredibly powerful programs. I hope you found the video useful and I will see you in the next one. 12. Product Lifecycle: Hello everyone and welcome back. In today's video, we are talking all about product life cycle and its implications from a marketing perspective. Now the important thing to understand is that every product that's introduced will go through a life cycle. So think of all the products that you had when you were growing up that were the hot, new thing to have and then they kind of died out. Right? When we're looking at product life cycle from a marketing perspective, it's important to understand what phase of the life cycle our product is in, because we're going to have a little bit of a different marketing approach. Now this is just a general graph and it's important to understand that each product is going to go through a different life cycle at a different speed. But in general, we break it into four key categories. The first is when the product is introduced. This is when it is the hot new thing that nobody has heard of, right? So think of if you were the first person to get an iphone, right, it's a completely new product, No one has heard of it. And during this time frame, we're not actually making a whole lot of money on this product because we've put so much into research development, we're probably having to do a lot of marketing at this point because no one's heard of the product. So we're really having to drive home those benefits. We're having to tell people, hey, we know you've never had this before, been living just fine without a ipod. You've been living just fine without a smartphone. But here's why you need this product. We're really having to sell the product. As we move on into the growth phase, this is where more and more people start hearing about this product, right? It slowly seeps its way into everyday life. We start to increase sales and we get to a break even point when it comes to profit, right? We're finally making enough money to recoup all of that research, development, and marketing costs. At some point our product gets to a mature phase. This is when the market, everyone knows about the product. Everyone has the product, lots of competitors to the product, right? So think of smartphones. Again, we don't just have the iphone now. We've got 30 different manufacturers all making their own smartphones. And then at some point we're going to start to have a decline in sales and profit as people move on to other things, right? So think about DVD's, DVD players, VHS players, right? Cd players, all of these things don't really impact us that much anymore, right? Companies aren't making a ton of money on them, at least not like they used to. So when it comes to marketing, in all of these different life cycles, there's a couple important things that I want to mention when it comes to introduction of a new product. Remember, we don't really have any competitors because they don't exist. So what we're trying to do here is raise awareness, right? You need a smartphone, right? I'm not trying to convince you that Android is better than Apple, because there's literally only one, you need a smartphone. I'm the only one that has it. When it comes to pricing, something that you'll see is a skimming pricing strategy. This basically says, we're going to charge a really high price to recoup our investment costs, but also because the people that are going to buy this, they are the trend setters, They're the wealthy people, so it doesn't matter they're going to buy it one way or another. So might as well charge a high price for it. As we are getting into the growth stage, this is where other people, other firms say, while they are making a lot of money on that smartphone, give me a share of the action, right? So competition starts to come into the equation. Now our marketing shifts a little bit. We're not just saying you need a smartphone. We're saying this is why you need my smartphone. This is why mine is better than these competitors that just started a year ago. And then when we're getting into the maturity phase, we're trying to find new uses for the product, add features, cut costs, try out new markets. This is a really challenging time because we're really having to innovate and we're seeing our profits kind of start to taper off, right? So maybe when I first invented a smartphone, it was all about communicating with people, sending messages, checking your e mail. Now I'm like, okay, I really need to keep pushing up these smartphone sales, but there's really nothing left. Okay, maybe I start marketing it as a mobile gaming platform or something like that. And then lastly, once we start entering the decline phase, we've got to make a decision. Do we harvest the product? And when we harvest, we're basically just tapering off our investment and whatever money we make we make or do we just completely divest it? We drop it entirely from the product line so we can move on to other things. So product life cycle, absolutely huge when it comes to marketing because depending on which phase of the product life cycle we're in, we're going to have a different approach to marketing our product. But I hope you found this video useful and I appreciate you watching, I will see in the next one. 13. Course Conclusion : Hello everyone and welcome back. In today's video, I just wanted to take a few minutes to give you an absolutely huge congratulations and a high five for making it all the way through the course. I know that watching all of the videos can sometimes be a little bit of a time investment. So again, just wanted to say congratulations. I hope that you found the course useful. I'm honored that I got to be a part of your learning journey and I sincerely wish you the best in all of your future learning endeavors.