Life's a Pitch: Session Four

Today we learnt the importance of marketing. Marketing is the process of understanding what a group of consumers want or need and how to deliver it to them. It is much to do with market research and identifying customers needs as opposed to advertising; advertising is just a tool of marketing.

6 Functions of marketing

• Identify customers needs and develop new products through market research
• Promote and introduce products to an identified audience or target market
• Product management-monitoring and assessing the performance of the product
• Developing an appropriate pricing strategy
• Identify distribution network
• Value added-improve customer experience through value added benefits

What can be marketed?

Anything! Goods, services, events, experiences, personalities, places, organisations, properties, information, ideas and concepts. It is a creative process, each marketer has their own approach

The four P's (marketing mix)

• Product-tangible or intangible good or service that satisfies the needs of a customer
• Price-price paid for the product or service
• Place-arena/context through which the customer can access the product
• Promotion-all methods of communication used to inform all parties about the product

Benefits of marketing

• Describe and expose your product/service to potential consumers using a range of techniques
• Helps you to understand what unique needs your product/service meets
• Marketing delivers the message and philosophy underpinning your product/service
• Helps to reveal weaknesses and gaps in comparison with competitors
• Identify a range of audiences to advertise to
• Inform existing and new consumers and new customers about new and developing products and how and where to access them

How???

Market research!

• Primary- new data specific to product/service that has not been collected before 
• Secondary- existing data

Research types

• Quantitative- factual
• Qualitative- opinionated

SWOT Analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats)

Strengths: 

• Routed in illustration, not interior design
• Traditional hand craft techniques
• More personal customer relationship
• Able to make mock-ups, increasing customer trust

Weaknesses:

• No first-hand experience as of yet
• Manifesto too broad/vague, we need to rethink this or we could be misinterpreted
• No confidence in the materials we are to use
• Large scale and time consuming tasks

Opportunities

• Annual events-more likely to gain customer loyalty
• More customer awareness with exposure
• Collaboration with other local businesses

Threats

• Imitation by mega corps
• Lack of power

Evaluation

Today's session has been really helpful to refresh my mind about the whole marketing process which I learnt in A-Level Business studies and really enjoyed! Although it was more exciting today because as a group we actually had the power to apply these principles to our business, which is a big jump from simply writing on an exam paper.

Studying the marketing mix and the functions of marketing laid down a strong foundation in which we can refine and develop our existing ideas for 'viswallise', and become stronger and more confident as a group. Admittedly, for a lot of us PPP has been sitting on the back-burner for a while due to the heavy demand of practical work in other modules, but today has really inspired me and urged me to work really hard in Life's a Pitch, and deliver a substantial, high quality service with my group.