MAR 3023 Final Exam Study Guide Flashcards

Marketing Concepts

• Definition and Importance of Marketing: Understanding what marketing is and why it's crucial for business success.
• Exchange: The process where parties give something of value to each other.
• Marketing Orientations and Philosophies:
  • Product Orientation
  • Sales Orientation
  • Market Orientation
  • Societal Orientation
• Customer Value: The benefit a customer receives from a product or service relative to what they offer.
• Customer Satisfaction: The extent to which a product's perceived performance matches a buyer's expectations.

Strategic Marketing Management

• Controllable and Uncontrollable Variables: Identifying factors a company can and cannot control (e.g., the 4Ps vs. economic conditions).
• SWOT Analysis: A framework for evaluating a company's:
  • Strengths
  • Weaknesses
  • Opportunities
  • Threats
• Elements of the Marketing Mix (4Ps):
  • Product
  • Price
  • Place (Distribution)
  • Promotion
• External Environmental Factors: Economic, social, technological, competitive, and regulatory factors.
• Sources of Competitive Advantage: What sets a company apart from its competitors (e.g., cost leadership, differentiation).
• Strategic Alternatives: Different approaches a company can take to achieve its goals (e.g., market penetration, market development).
• Portfolio Matrix: A tool for analyzing a company's product portfolio (e.g., BCG Matrix: Stars, Cash Cows, Question Marks, Dogs).
• Target Market Strategy: Selecting specific segments of the market to focus marketing efforts on.
• External Environment: Understanding factors outside of a company's direct control that may impact its marketing strategies.

Consumer Decision-Making Process

• Steps in the Decision Process:
  • Need Recognition
  • Information Search
  • Evaluation of Alternatives
  • Purchase
  • Post-Purchase Behavior
• Evoked Set: A group of brands a consumer considers acceptable when making a purchase.
• Cognitive Dissonance: The feeling of post-purchase psychological tension or anxiety.
• Involvement and Factors Determining Level of Involvement: The amount of time and effort a buyer invests in the search, evaluation, and decision processes of consumer behavior:
  • Previous Experience
  • Interest
  • Perceived risk of negative consequences
  • Social visibility
• Marketing Implications of Involvement: Strategies will vary depending on high or low involvement products.
• Types of Buying Decisions:
  • Routine Response Behavior
  • Limited Decision Making
  • Extensive Decision Making
• Factors Influencing Buying Decisions: Cultural, social, individual, and psychological factors.
• Components and Effects of Culture: Values, beliefs, customs, and tastes produced or practiced by a group of people.
• Social Influences on Consumer Buying Decisions: Reference groups, opinion leaders, and family.
• Psychological Influences: Motivation, perception, learning, beliefs, and attitudes.
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: A theory of motivation that outlines five levels of needs:
  • Physiological
  • Safety
  • Social
  • Esteem
  • Self-Actualization
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): $CLV = \frac{\text{Customer Revenue} - \text{Cost of Serving Customer}}{\text{Discount Rate} - \text{Retention Rate}}$

Market Segmentation

• Importance of Market Segmentation: Dividing a market into meaningful, relatively similar, and identifiable segments or groups.
• Criteria for Successful Market Segmentation:
  • Substantiality
  • Identifiability and Measurability
  • Accessibility
  • Responsiveness
• Doing Market Segmentation: Steps involved in dividing a total market.
• Benefits of Segmentation: More precise marketing, efficient resource allocation, and better understanding of customer needs.
• Target Markets and Strategies for Selecting Target Markets:
  • Undifferentiated Targeting
  • Concentrated Targeting
  • Multi-segment Targeting
• Positioning: Developing a specific marketing mix to influence potential customers' overall perception of a brand, product line, or organization in general.
• Product Differentiation: A positioning strategy that some firms use to distinguish their products from those of competitors.
• Perceptual Maps: A means of displaying or graphing, in two or more dimensions, the location of products, brands, or groups of products in customers’ minds.
• Repositioning: Changing consumers’ perceptions of a brand in relation to competing brands.

Marketing Research

• Steps in Marketing Research Process:
  • Identifying the problem
  • Planning the research design
  • Specify the sampling procedures
  • Collecting the data
  • Analyzing the data
  • Preparing and presenting the report
  • Following up
• Secondary Data: Data previously collected for any purpose other than the one at hand.
• Planning Research Design: Specifying which research questions must be answered, how and when the data will be gathered, and how the data will be analyzed.
• Primary Data: Information collected for the first time; can be used for solving the particular problem under investigation.
• Survey Research: The most popular technique for gathering primary data, in which a researcher interacts with people to obtain facts, opinions, and attitudes.
• Questionnaire: A form including a set of structured questions designed to gather information from respondents.
• Observational Research: A research method that relies on three types of observation: people watching people, people watching an activity, and machines watching people.
• Experiments: A method a researcher uses to gather primary data.
• Sampling: Selecting representative units from a total population.
• Types of Samples: Probability samples (e.g., random, stratified) and non-probability samples (e.g., convenience, judgment).
• Types of Errors in Marketing Research: Measurement error, sampling error, and frame error.
• Collecting and Analyzing Data: Converting data into useful information for management decision-making.
• Focus Groups: A type of qualitative research where a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging.

Managing Products and Brands

• Types of Products: Consumer products and business products.
• Product Items: A specific version of a product that can be designated as a distinct offering among an organization's products.
• Product Lines: A group of closely related product items.
• Product Mixes: All products that an organization sells.
• Product Modifications: Changing one or more of a product’s characteristics.
• Repositioning: Changing consumers’ perceptions of a brand in relation to competing brands.
• Branding, Branding Strategies, and Different Types of Brands: Using a name, term, symbol, or design to identify a product.
• Co-Branding: Placing two or more brand names on a product or its package.
• Trademarks: The exclusive right to use a brand or part of a brand.
• Diffusion of Innovation: The process by which the adoption of an innovation spreads.
• Rate of Adoption: The speed with which new products are adopted.
• Product Life Cycle (PLC): The stages a new product goes through starting with introduction and ending with decline, with the four general stages: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, Decline

Pricing Strategies

• Importance of Pricing: Capturing revenue and indicating product value.
• Trends Influencing Prices: New products, increase in availability of bargain-priced private and generic brands, price cutting to maintain or regain market share, internet used for comparison shopping.
• Pricing Objectives: Goals companies hope to achieve through pricing strategies.
• Profit-Oriented Pricing Objectives: Profit Maximization, Satisfactory Profits, Target Return on Investment (ROI).
• Sales-Oriented Pricing Objectives: Focus on increasing sales volume or market share.
• Status Quo Pricing Objectives: Maintaining existing prices or matching competitor's prices.
• Demand and Supply Determinants of Price: Factors affecting how much customers are willing to pay and how much producers are willing to sell.
• Elasticity of Demand: Consumer's responsiveness or sensitivity to changes in price. $Elasticity = \frac{\% \text{Change in Quantity}}{\% \text{Change in Price}}$
• Yield Management Systems: A technique for adjusting prices to maximize revenue.
• Cost Determinant of Price: Setting prices based on costs (e.g., cost-plus pricing, break-even pricing).
• Break-Even Pricing: Determining the price at which total revenue equals total cost. $\text{Break Even Point (Units)} = \frac{\text{Fixed Costs}}{\text{Price} - \text{Variable Costs}}$
• Price Skimming: Charging a high introductory price, often coupled with heavy promotion.
• Penetration Pricing: Charging a relatively low price for a product initially as a way to reach the mass market.

Distribution Strategy

• Marketing Channels: A set of interdependent organizations that ease the transfer of ownership as products move from producer to business user or consumer.
• Discrepancies: Differences in quantity, assortment, time, and space that must be overcome by marketing channels.
• Channel Intermediaries: Retailers, wholesalers, and other firms that assist in moving goods from producers to end users.
• Channel Strategy Decisions: Factors that affecting channel choice such as market, product, and producer factors.
• Distribution Intensity:
  • Intensive Distribution (available in every outlet)
  • Selective Distribution (screening dealers to eliminate all but a few in any single area)
  • Exclusive Distribution (only one or a few dealers within a given area).
• Types of Channel Relationships: Arm's length, cooperative, and integrated relationships.
• Social Dimensions of Channels: Channel Power, Control, Leadership, Conflict, and Partnering.
• Channel Conflicts: Horizontal conflict (occurs among firms at the same level of the channel) and vertical conflict (occurs between different levels of the same channel).
• Channel Power: A channel member's capacity to control or influence the behavior of other channel members.
• Channel Partnering: The joint effort of all channel members to create a supply chain that serves customers and creates a competitive advantage.
• Retailing: All the activities directly related to the sale of goods and services to the ultimate consumer for personal, nonbusiness use.
• Types of Stores: Department stores, specialty stores, supermarkets, drugstores, convenience stores, discount stores, restaurants, etc.
• Product Assortments: Width and depth of product lines offered.
• Non-store Retailing: Shopping without visiting a store (e.g., online retailing, direct selling, vending machines).

Integrated Marketing Communications

• Role of Promotion in Marketing Mix: Communication by marketers that informs, persuades, and reminds potential buyers of a product in order to influence an opinion or elicit a response.
• Promotion Mix: The combination of promotional tools—including advertising, public relations, personal selling, sales promotion, and social media—used to reach the target market and fulfill the organization’s overall goals.
• Advertising: Any paid form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor.
• Public Relations: The marketing function that evaluates public attitudes, identifies areas within the organization the public may be interested in, and executes a program of action to earn public understanding and acceptance.
• Sales Promotion: Marketing activities—other than personal selling, advertising, and public relations—that stimulate consumer buying and dealer effectiveness.
• Personal Selling: A purchase situation involving a personal, paid-for communication between two people in an attempt to influence each other.
• Marketing Communication: Managing all marketing communications aspects as a way to deliver a consistent message to the target audience.
• Communication Process:
  • Sender
  • Encoding
  • Message Channel
  • Decoding
  • Receiver
• Goals and Tasks of Promotion: Informing, persuading, reminding, and connecting.
• AIDA Concept: A model that outlines the process for achieving promotion goals in terms of:
  • Attention
  • Interest
  • Desire
  • Action
• Factors Affecting Choice of Promotional Mix: Nature of the product, stage in the PLC, target market characteristics, type of buying decision, available funds, and push vs. pull strategies.
• Product Life Cycle and Promotional Mix: Promotional strategies vary depending on the stage of the PLC.
• Promotion and Target Market Characteristics: Different promotions will be more effective with different target markets.
• Promotion and Type of Buying Decision: Routine, limited, or extensive decisions require different types of promotions.
• Push vs. Pull Strategies:
  • Push Strategy (using aggressive personal selling and trade advertising to convince a wholesaler or a retailer to carry and sell their merchandise)
  • Pull Strategy (stimulating consumer demand to obtain product distribution)

CSR, Ethics, Morals, Foreign Business Practices

• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): A businesses’ concern for society’s welfare.
• Ethics in Business: Moral principles or values that generally govern the conduct of an individual or a group.
• FCPA (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act): A law that prohibits U.S. corporations from making illegal payments to foreign officials.

Global/International Marketing

• Importance and Benefits of Global Marketing: Reaching new markets, increasing revenue, and diversifying risk.
• Individualism-Collectivism: The degree to which a culture values individual achievement versus collective achievement
• Power Distance Index: The extent to which less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.
• Uncertainty Avoidance Index: The degree to which societies are willing to tolerate uncertainty and risk.
• Role of Culture: Culture underlies the family, educational system, religion, and social class systems.
• Values, and Beliefs: Enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to another mode of conduct or end-state of existence.
• Standardization vs. Adaptation: Whether to use the same marketing mix globally or adapt it to local markets.
• Countertrade: A form of trade in which all or part of the payment for goods or services is in the form of other goods or services.

Sensory Marketing

• Different Sensory Inputs: Sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.
• Marketing Implications of Sensory Perceptions: Using sensory cues to influence consumer behavior.

Digital Marketing

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
• Digital Advertising: Online advertising (e.g., display ads, search engine marketing).

Emerging Technologies in Marketing

• Virtual Reality (VR): A computer-simulated environment that can be a simulation of the real world or an imaginary world.
• Augmented Reality (AR): A technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world, thus providing a composite view.
• Eye-Tracking Technology: Measuring eye movements to understand visual attention.
• Service Robots: Robots that perform services for humans.

Artificial Intelligence

• Machine Learning: A type of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.
• AI applications in marketing: Chatbots, personalized recommendations, predictive analytics.