To attain success in the rapidly evolving marketing industry, it is imperative to grasp diverse marketing strategies, such as social, personal, place, and organizational marketing. Each approach presents unique opportunities, including product promotion on social media, personal branding, location-specific advertising, and establishing robust brand identities.
In this post, we will delve deep into these marketing types, uncover their fundamental principles, and provide valuable insights.
Let’s learn the secrets of effective marketing strategies propel your brand to new heights and explore the power of social, personal, place, and organizational marketing strategies for success in the modern world.
7 Types Of Marketing
Idea Marketing
Ideas are also marketed. All marketing involves the marketing of an idea-either specific or general. Here we will concentrate on marketing social ideas, such as public health campaigns to give up smoking and drug taking; environmental campaigns to protect forests, and other campaigns such as family planning, human rights, and literacy.
This area has been termed social marketing. Social marketing is the design, implementation, and control of programs seeking to increase the acceptability of a social idea, cause or practice among a target group.
Social marketers can pursue different objectives. They might want to produce understanding (knowing the nutritional value of different foods) or trigger one-time action (joining a mass immunization campaign).
They might want to change their behavior (discouraging drunk driving) or a basic belief (convincing employers that handicapped people can contribute strongly to the workforce).
Social marketers use a variety of advertising campaigns. But mere advertising is not enough to accomplish the goals of social marketing.
Many social marketing campaigns do not succeed because they over-emphasize the role of advertising and do not pay adequate attention to developing and using all the marketing-mix tools.
Social marketers follow the conventional marketing planning process to design effective social-change strategies. At the first step of the process, the social-change objective is defined.
For example, reducing the percentage of teenage smokers from 10 percent to 5 percent within five years.
Next, social marketers analyze teenagers’ attitudes, beliefs, values, behavior, and factors that encourage teenage smoking.
They contemplate communication and distribution approaches that might prevent teenagers from smoking, develop a marketing plan, and build a marketing organization to execute the plan.
In the end, social marketers evaluate the whole program and make the necessary adjustment to make it more effective.
Social marketing is a recent phenomenon, and its effectiveness relative to other social-change strategies is difficult to measure.
It is difficult to produce social change with any strategy, particularly when it relies on voluntary response. The main areas where social marketing has been applied are family planning, environmental protection, energy conservation, public health, literacy, improved health and nutrition, auto driver safety, and public transportation.
Social marketing has achieved some encouraging successes. But more applications are required to properly assess social marketing’s potential for producing social change.
Person Marketing or Celebrity Marketing
Person marketing consists of activities to create, maintain, or change attitudes or behavior toward particular people. All kinds of people and organizations practice person marketing. Politicians market themselves to get votes and to secure public support for their programs.
Entertainers and sports personalities promote their careers and enhance their incomes through personal marketing. Professionals such as doctors, lawyers, accountants, and architects also use personal marketing to build their reputations and increase their businesses.
Business leaders also use personal marketing to ensure their company’s success as well as their own.
Person marketing aims at creating a “celebrity.” A celebrity is a well-known person whose name generates attention, interest, and action. The visibility of different celebrities varies considerably.
Some celebrities are well-known but only in limited geographic areas (a local business entrepreneur) or specific segments (a Sitarist with a small group of fans). Some celebrities (sports superstars, world political leaders) have wide national or international visibility.
The durability of celebrities also varies greatly. The person’s visibility begins at a low level, gradually builds to a peak as the person matures and becomes well known, then declines as the celebrity fades from the limelight.
But as the rest of the figure shows, celebrity life-cycle patterns can vary greatly.
For example, in the overnight pattern (figure-B), a person acquires quick and lasting visibility because of some major deed or event. In the comeback pattern (figure-C), a celebrity achieves high visibility, loses it, then gets it back again. In the meteor pattern (figure-D), someone gains fame quickly and then loses it suddenly.
The personal marketing process has similarities to that of product and service marketing. Person marketing begins with careful market research and analysis to identify consumer needs and market segments, followed by product development.
It includes assessing the person’s current qualities and image and molding the person to better match market needs and expectations.
Place Marketing
Place marketing involves creating, maintaining, or changing attitudes or behavior toward particular places.
Business site marketing and tourism marketing are typical examples of place marketing. Business site marketing consists of developing, selling, or renting business sites for factories, stores, offices, warehouses, and conventions.
Property developers assess various organizations and land needs and offer real estate solutions, such as industrial parks, shopping centers, and new office buildings.
In the USA, most states operate industrial development offices that try to sell companies on the advantages of locating new plants in their states. They spend large sums on advertising and offer to fly prospects to the site at no cost.
Troubled cities like New York City, Detroit, Dallas, and Atlanta have appointed task forces to improve their images and draw new businesses.
They may build large centers to house important conventions and business meetings. Even nations such as Canada, Ireland, Greece, Mexico, and Turkey have marketed themselves as good locations for business investment.
Tourism marketing consists of activities to attract vacationers to resorts, cities, states, and even entire nations.
Travel agents, airlines, motor clubs, hotels, motels, tour operators, and governmental agencies are engaged in tourism marketing. Tourism is a rapidly expanding industry, and almost every country, state, and city markets its tourist attractions.
Organization Marketing
Various organizations often perform activities to “sell” the organization itself. Organization marketing consists of activities undertaken to create, maintain, or change the attitudes and behavior of target consumers toward an organization.
Both profit and nonprofit organizations are increasingly accepting and practicing organization marketing.
Business firms undertake public relations or corporate advertising campaigns to brighten their images. Nonprofit organizations, such as colleges, charities, museums, and performing arts groups, market their organizations for raising funds and attracting members or patrons.
Effective organizational marketing requires assessing the organization’s current image and developing a marketing plan to improve it.
Assessing Organization Image
Assessing an organization’s image begins with researching the organization’s current image among key public. Organizational image means the way an individual or a group perceives an organization.
An organization may have different images among different people. The organization might be complacent with its current public image or think it has image problems.
For example, suppose a bank conducts marketing research to measure its image in the community. It finds its image to be that shown by the mauve line on the right in the figure.
Current and potential customers view the bank as somewhat small, noninnovative, unfriendly, and unknowledgeable. The bank will want to change this image.
Image Planning and Control
The organization now must decide what image it would like to have and what is achievable by it. We can consider the example of the bank given earlier. The bank might decide that it would like the image shown in the figure. It would like to be seen as a provider of more friendly and personal service and as larger, more innovative, and more knowledgeable.
The organization now designs a marketing plan with the objective of shifting its actual image toward the actual one.
Let us assume that the bank first wants to improve its image as an organization that provides friendly and personal service. The basic step, however, is to provide friendlier and more personal service.
The bank can recruit and train better employees who interact with customers. It can renovate its office premises. After being sure that it has improved its performance on important image dimensions, the bank can design a marketing program to communicate that new image to customers.
For this purpose, the bank can use public relations. It can sponsor communally activities, send its executives to speak to local business and citizen groups, hold public household finance seminars, and issue press releases on various bank activities.
Through its advertisements, the bank can position itself as “your friendly, personal neighborhood bank.”
Organizations find corporate image advertising a very useful tool to market themselves to various publics. Cooperate advertising is used to build up or maintain a favorable image over a long time. Or they can use it to balance events that might impair their image.
For example, Waste Management, the giant garbage disposal company, got into trouble a few years ago for dumping toxic waste. So to counter with an advertising campaign telling how the company has worked with various government agencies to help save a threatened species of butterfly.
An organization must conduct a survey of its public intermittently to know whether its activities are improving its image. Important things should be kept in mind; image changing needs time, limited campaign funds, and more or less rigid public images.
If the organization fails to improve its image, it implies that it would have to change either its marketing offer or its organization’s marketing program.
Product-Variety Marketing
In product-variety marketing, the seller produces two or more products with different features, styles, quality, etc.
Subsequently, companies’ produced several kinds of toothpaste bearing different brands with different packages. They were designed to offer variety to consumers rather than creating different appeals to different market segments.
Service Marketing
In recent years services have witnessed tremendous growth, especially in developed economies. Whereas service jobs accounted for 55 percent of all U.S. jobs in 1970, by 1993, they accounted for 79 percent of total employment.
Services are expected to be responsible for all net job growth through the year 2005. Services are growing even faster in the world economy, making up a quarter of all international trade value.
Services include jobs performed by service industries such as hotels, airlines, banks, telecommunications, and others.
Various service industries are found to exist. The governments offer services to the public through courts, employment services, hospitals, loan agencies, police, fire brigades, and postal service.
Private nonprofit organizations offer services through museums, charities, educational institutions, foundations, and hospitals.
A large number of business organizations also offer services. They include airlines, banks, hotels, insurance companies, consulting firms, medical and law practices, entertainment companies, real estate firms, advertising, research agencies, and retailers.
However, with the socio-economic and cultural changes, many types of services are coming up.
Strategies for Services Marketing
Even in the recent past, service firms differed from manufacturing firms in their marketing orientation.
Many service firms thought that they were too small to use marketing (auto repair shops, dry cleaners), while others thought demand for their services was high. Marketing was unnecessary (colleges and hospitals). Some firms even regarded marketing as unprofessional (legal and medical practices).
Nowadays, service firms adopt marketing like manufacturing firms to position themselves strongly in selected target markets. Service firms position themselves through traditional marketing mix activities.
Today, however, it is recognized that service marketing requires more than traditional external marketing using the marketing mix.
Three Types of Marketing in Service Firms are;
- internal marketing.
- interactive marketing, and
- external marketing.
Internal marketing means that the service firm must effectively train and motivate its customer-contact employees and support service people to work as a team to provide customer satisfaction.
All the members of a firm must practice customer orientation to ensure consistent delivery of high service quality. Internal marketing must take place before external marketing.
Interactive marketing means that perceived service quality is strongly dependent on the quality of the buyer-seller interaction.
In service marketing, service quality is related to both the service deliverer and the delivery quality. This is especially true in the case of professional services. The customer considers technical quality as well as functional quality in judging service quality.
Thus, professionals can not expect to satisfy the customer by providing good technical service only. Also, they have to acquire interactive marketing skills or functions.
Today, to be successful, service firms have to accomplish three major marketing tasks. They need to increase their competitive differentiation, service quality, and productivity.
Increasing Competitive Differentiation
As price competition is being intensified, service marketers find it more difficult to differentiate their services from those of competitors. More similar to the services of different providers, the less concerned will be the customers about the provider than the price.
Price competition can be tackled by developing a differentiated offer, delivery, and image. The offer should carry innovative features that distinguish one company’s offer from those of others.
For example, airlines have introduced such innovations as in-flight movies, advanced seating, air-to-ground telephone service, and frequent-flyer award programs to differentiate their offers.
Although innovations are imitated easily, service companies that try for continuous innovation will find it easier to keep customers loyal to them.
Service companies can differentiate service delivery from competitors through people, physical environment, and processes.
The company can employ customer-contact people who are more competent and reliable than those of its competitors. The company can also create a better physical environment for delivering the service product.
Finally, the company can tailor an improved delivery process. Service companies can also differentiate their images through compatible symbols and branding.
Increasing Service Quality
A service company can differentiate itself from its competitors by delivering consistently higher quality services. Many service companies are now practicing total quality management, like manufacturing companies. Many companies realize that exceptional service quality can give a competitive advantage, which results in better sales and profit performance.
Good service quality management should aim at keeping the quality of the delivered service above the customers’ service-quality expectations.
When a given firm’s perceived service exceeds expected, customers are inclined to use the provider again. The best measure of service quality is customer retention. A service firm’s ability to retain its customers depends largely on how consistently it delivers value.
The service firm must identify the expectations of target customers regarding service quality. Although service quality is hard to define, and higher service quality involves increased costs, service investment is rewarded through increased customer retention and sales.
After deciding the level of service to be provided, the service provider must clearly define and communicate that level so that its employees know what they must deliver and customers know what they will get.
Many service companies have developed streamlined, efficient, and consistent service-delivery systems. Companies should take steps to provide good service every time. Besides, they should learn how to recover from service mistakes when they do occur.
To accomplish this goal, companies take steps to empower front-line service employees. Companies give these employees the authority, responsibility, and incentives vitally needed to recognize and fulfill customer needs.
Empowerment training encourages employees to go beyond their regular jobs to solve customer problems. Such empowered employees can act swiftly and efficiently to keep service problems from resulting in lost customers.
It has been observed that well-managed and reputed service companies have some common characteristics concerning service quality.
First, leading service companies are “customer-obsessed.” They pursue a clearcut strategy for satisfying customer needs that gain enduring customer loyalty.
Second, successful service companies have a tradition of top management commitment to quality. Management of these companies is interested in financial performance and in-service performance.
Third, well-doing service companies set high service quality standards. For example, Swissair aims to have 96 percent or more of its passengers rate it to serve as good or superior; otherwise, it takes action.
Fourth, thriving service companies monitor service performance closely. They review their service performance and that of competitors. They follow methods such as comparison shopping, customer surveys, and suggestion and complaint forms.
For example, General Electric sends out 700,000 response cards yearly to households that rate their service people’s performance.
Increasing Productivity
As costs rise, service companies are trying hard to increase service productivity. They can take several steps in doing so. The service companies can provide better training to their employees. They can also recruit new employees with improved skills.
Service companies can even increase the quantity of their service by sacrificing some quality. The service providers can mechanize the service by introducing equipment.
They can also adopt measures for standardizing production. Commercial dishwashing, jumbo jets, and multiple-unit movie theaters represent technological service expansions.
Another way of increasing productivity is to design more effective services. The need for expensive local professionals can be reduced by hiring paralegal workers. Service providers can also encourage customers to substitute company labor with their labor.
However, service companies must not overemphasize quality, which may reduce perceived quality.
While some productivity measures help standardize quality and increase customer satisfaction, others lead to too much standardization and deprive consumers of customized service. Mechanization of service and cost-cutting can increase the efficiency of a service company in the short run.
Still, it reduces the company’s ability, in the long run, to innovate, maintain service quality, or respond to consumer needs and desires. Creating more service differentiation or quality, service providers accept reduced productivity in some situations.
Organizing the Marketing Department
A company must organize a marketing department for efficient marketing analysis, planning, implementation, and control. If the company is tiny, a separate marketing department may not exist. But as the company grows, a marketing department organization is built to carry out marketing activities.
In big companies, this department is operated by specialists such as product managers, salespeople and sales managers, market researchers, advertising experts, and other specialists.
The marketing department can be organized in several ways. The most popular form of marketing organization is a functional organization.
In a functional organization, different marketing activities are managed by an available specialist, such as a sales manager, advertising manager, marketing research manager, customer service manager, and new-product manager.
Another form of marketing organization is a geographic organization, which is used by companies selling across the country or internationally.
In a geographic organization, sales and marketing people are assigned to specific countries, regions, and districts. The geographic organization has some benefits; it enables salespeople to settle into a particular territory, get to know their customers, and involves minimum travel time and cost.
Companies with many and varied products or brands are found to use a product management organization. In this organization, a product manager is responsible for developing and implementing a complete strategy and marketing plan for a specific product or brand.
Another modern marketing organization is the market management organization, which is best suited to companies that sell one product line to many different market types with different needs and preferences.
In a market management organization, market managers are responsible for developing long-range and annual plans for the sales and profits in their markets. The main advantage of a market management organization is that the company prioritizes the needs of specific customer segments.
Relationship Marketing
The relationship is the process of creating, maintaining & enhancing strong, value-laden relationships with customers.
It’s a pattern of building long-term, satisfying relationships with customers, suppliers, and distributors in order to retain their long-term performances and business. The psychological factors affecting consumer behavior are as follows:
Motivation
Motivation is what will drive consumers to develop a purchasing behavior. It is the expression of a need is which became pressing enough to lead the consumer to want to satisfy it. It is usually working at a subconscious level and is often difficult to measure.
To increase sales and encourage consumers to purchase, brands should try to create, make conscious, or reinforce a need in the consumer’s mind so that he develops a purchase motivation. He will be much more interested in considering and buying their products.
Perception
Perception is the process through which an individual selects, organizes, and interprets the information he receives in order to do something that makes sense. The perception of a situation at a given time may decide if and how the person will act.
Learning
Learning is through action. When we act, we learn. It implies a change in the behavior resulting from the experience. Learning changes the behavior of an individual as he acquires information and experience.
For example, if you are sick after drinking milk, you have a negative experience, associate the milk with this state of discomfort, and “learn” that you should not drink milk. Therefore, you don’t buy milk anymore.
Rather, if you had a good experience with the product, you will have much more desire to buy it again next time.
Beliefs and attitudes
A belief is a conviction that an individual has on something. Through the experience he acquires, his learning, and his external influences (family, friends, etc..), he will develop beliefs influencing his buying behavior.
While an attitude can be defined as a feeling, an assessment of an object or idea, and the predisposition to act in a certain way toward that object, attitudes allow the individual to develop a coherent behavior against a class of similar objects or ideas.
Beliefs and attitudes are generally well-anchored in the individual’s mind and are difficult to change. For many people, their beliefs and attitudes are part of their personality and of who they are.
However, it is important to understand, identify and analyze the positive attitudes and beliefs and the negative ones that consumers can have about a brand or product. To change the brand’s marketing message or adjust its positioning to get consumers to change their brand perception.
