As the semester comes to a close, I find it necessary to reflect on all that I’ve learned from this marketing course and on what I have learned through keeping this blog.
To begin, I will address one of the most significant things I have learned this semester, which is understanding that the marketing process starts and ends with customers and consumers.
As my marketing professor put it, the consumer is a marketers bread and butter. It is “the activity for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that benefit its customers” and “stresses the need to deliver genuine benefits in the offerings of goods, services, and ideas marketed to customers.” There is no marketing process without consumers and customers because every single element of developing, advertising, and promoting a product is done with the customer in mind.
The first objective in marketing is discovering the needs of prospective customers. New products that launch as a result of identifying consumer needs are usually more successful if the company focuses on the benefits the customer can gain from the product. After identifying what the consumers need and want, they can produce those needs and not produce what customers don’t need or want (obviously).
After selecting a target market, which is the specific group of persons a marketer wants to sell their product to, it is then that marketers can develop their marketing mix factors, which includes selecting the appropriate product, price, promotion, and place for the targeted consumer.
But the marketing experience extends way past meeting the demands of the consumers. In order to maintain customer relationships, it is important for a company to engage in relationship marketing, “which links the organization to its individual customers, employees, suppliers, and other partners for their mutual long-term benefit.”
In addition to the knowledge I’ve gained about the marketing process, I have also had the opportunity to put these marketing objectives into action via team and individual projects, research, reports and presentations.
I believe that the most effective way to gain knowledge in any field is through applied experience, which is exactly what I gained through the selling of backpacks in a virtual marketing simulation, a semester-long team project. In the simulation, my team and I were responsible for the 4 P’s in the marketing mix--product, promotion, pricing, and place.
We were in charge of creating a product for a target market of our choice and made weekly decisions on advertising and promotions, distribution channels, and changes in the product to suite the needs and wants of our consumers. Through the weekly decision came quarterly financial sheets and feedback from customers about things that did and did not work for our product. After completing a financial analysis on our company after a few weeks of sales, I realized how difficult it was to create a backpack that completely suited the needs and desires of our target market, and how difficult it was to spend money wisely and still get our product properly advertised and distributed. Making these weekly decisions really forced me to understand the weight that each had on our company and product, which meant that our team really had to understand how our decisions to change aspects in the marketing mix and target markets reflected the consumer behavior and financial implications of our business.
Through this experiential learning, I was able to improve my knowledge in analyzing consumer behavior and the risks involved in trying to satisfy those needs. The many presentations we had throughout the semester, particularly the presentations on our financial progress and final results with the simulation really helped me to improve my presentation skills and helped me realize the importance of rehearsing and practicing beforehand, especially when working with a group.
In presenting our financial and final results for the marketing simulation, my team found that we had initially spent way too much money on advertising, which resulted in a negative net income at the end of the game despite the progress in sales we made towards the very end. This realization helped me to understand how marketers roles and functions can have on a company’s revenue and overall success and that many of the decisions they make can really help or harm the company. As a marketer, we had the role of positioning our product properly in the mind’s of the consumer and pricing it at a price that was affordable enough for our target market but set high enough to generate a profit. Through this class and the experiences I’ve had with the assignments and projects, I’ve learned that the role of a marketer is very tough and is a lot of pressure, but it can also be fun getting to create and advertise a new product successfully.
