Marketing Today for the Global Marketplace

Marketing is a field that has been around for thousands of years. It has been about the creation and capturing of customer value through advertisement and convincing people to buy companies goods. The media for marketing and selling has changed from word of mouth to newspaper ads, and then to radio which gave the first marketing people a method to advertise to the millions of people in this country.

There are different environments that marketing utilizes to sells its good.  The microenvironment is an internal environment of designing marketing plans, marketing management. Groups in a corporation have groups in their marketing organization.

The breakdown is from top management to finance, research, and management, purchasing, operations, and accounting. These companies have suppliers that produce its goods and services to the public. Besides a microenvironment used for marketing there is marketing intermediaries- companies to promote, sell, and distribute its good to final buyers.

The companies have a marketing strategy and they partner to build customer relationships. The structure of marketing over the decades has expanded to include marketing intermediaries which companies utilize to promote, sell, and distribute its goods to final buyers.

The customer markets include a wide variety of competitors. The marketing bases include a wide range of publics that include financial publics, media publics, government publics, citizens-action public, and local publics that work together to market product to a wide consumer base. Product being marketed has to go through a process of being analyzed by the marketing environment. The government has become involved with an increasing legislation to protect consumers from unfair business practices. This factors play into the marketing within the micro-environment that stretches to a regional or national level referred to the macro-environment. This type of environment includes the demographics, economic, natural, technological, political, and cultural forces. The demographic environment is the study of human populations by size, density, locations, age, gender, race, occupation, and other statistics. Baby Boomers, Generation X- (1965-1976, Generation Y (1977-2000) (Kotler, 2012)

There is the changing American family that is better educated due to the changes in our society and increased diversity of our cultural base. This necessitates the changes in marketing approaches. A product ranging from cars, clothing, and breakfast cereal have evolved over the years. The economic environment and economic factors that affect consumer purchasing power and spending patterns have changed with changes in lifestyles of Americans. The industrial economics, subsistence economics, and developing economics have evolved the needs of Americans as to what type of breakfasts Americans start with every day.

The natural environment or natural resources needed as inputs by marketers for marketing activities have grown with the growing population for marketing cereals by Kellogg’s and economic sustainability through strategies and practices that create a world economy. The marketing of nutria-grain cereal has become popular compared to sugar based cereal due to changes in consumer eating habits. The political and social environment, the cultural environment marketing environment has prompted Kellogg’s and others to market healthier cereals to the public. These companies have had to adhere to regulation and legislation that affects marketing with changing government agency enforcement, socially responsible behavior, cause-related marketing. Cereals today have to show their nutritional values on the side panel and adhere to nutritional standards that the public has demanded.

The cultural environment of institutions and other forces that affect societies basic values, perceptions, preferences, and behaviors have prompted this type of legislation.  Secondary cultural values: people’s views of themselves, people’s views of others, people’s views of organizations, people’s views of society, peoples vies of nature, peoples view of the universe.  There has been a focus on technology, ethics, economy, marketing by the numbers. This new technology has allowed corporations to managing marketing information to gain customer insights into what the public wants in the way of breakfast cereals to start their mornings.

Marketing information and customer’s insights - MIS consists of people and procedure for assessing information needs, developing the needed information, helping decisions makers, internal databases. Competitive marketing intelligence is used for assessing marketing information needs to create products that appeal to the public demands. With marketing research,  systematic design, collection, analysis, data relevant, and exploratory research - information to help define problems and suggest hypotheses is used to generate descriptive research, causal research. Primary data is information collected for a specific purpose such as marketing appeals and desires of the public for what foods the consumer enjoys eating daily. Secondary data is used for collected for another purpose such as products that have a potential market penetration. By analyzing and using marketing information consumer markets and consumer buyer behavior can be predicted for the creation of new product, Adoption process – awareness of new product, interest in new product, evaluation of new product, trail of new product, adoption of new product.  Influences of compatibility, complexity, divisibility, communicability are essential elements in helping for the formulation of a new successful product.

Business buyer behavior for buying goods and services, derived demand ultimately comes from the demand for consumer goods. Straight rebuy, modified rebuy, new task for packaging solution, and system selling. Users, influencers, buyers, deciders, and gatekeepers help to control flow of information to others in the marketplace. The media focuses the message that a corporation such as Kellogg’s wants to get to the public in the way of what cereals are the best for their daily needs. The major influences on business buyers are environmental factors, organizational factors, interpersonal factors, individual factors. Product specification, supplier search, proposal solicitation, supplier selection, order-routine specification, performance review, e-procurement are all part of the factors that are used to formulate and get a new product to the public. There is a customer-driven marketing strategy which facilitates the use of market segmentation, geographic segmentation, demographic segmentation, and age and life-cycle segmentation. Food in the supermarket differs from state to state and city to city based upon the cultural and ethnic diversity of the areas of product market penetration.

The behavioral segmentation, occasion segmentation, benefit segmentation, user status, usage rate, loyalty status and segmenting business markets are an integral part to making sure the right product gets to the right market segmentation. Market targeting, target marketing, mass marketing, undifferentiated marketing, differentiated marketing, concentrated marketing, micro-marketing, concentrated (niche) marketing, and individual marketing must be carefully orchestrated to make sure that when marketing a product such factors as the time of day and channels that breakfast, and food products are marketed. Channels for children in the morning are ideal to get the message to a family to buy specific cereals to the time of day and the viewing audience of television penetration. Product positioning on the right channels and during specific programming is a formula used to make sure the correct target audience is reached for the potential product being advertised to the public. Products, services, and brands are part of building customer value to obtain higher number of customers going to the grocery stores and buying the product that they saw on television. When they go shopping a consumer product, convenience product, shopping product, specialty product, unsought product, and industrial product are all part of the process of convincing the consumer that what the ad they saw on television is fresh in their mind when they go shopping. Brand equity is the differential effect that knowing a brand name has on customer response. The customer should have a specific product in mind to choose a specific product developed by the marketing campaign.

The importance of brand positioning, brand name selection, brand sponsorship, brand development, brand name selection, brand sponsorship, co-branding are all part of the process to make a consumer buy one brand of cereal or breakfast food over the competition.

When new product development is initiated in a product life-cycle there are important factors to consider during its evolution before introducing to the public. Idea generation, idea screening, concept development and testing, marketing strategy development, business analysis, product development, test marketing, commercialization are the phases used to get a new product from the concept phase to a successful product launch to the consumer’s masses. There are external ideas sources, crowdsourcing, idea screening, product concept, concept testing, and marketing strategy development.

Test marketing, commercialization, and customer-center new-product development is a pivotal element to get any new product into the public eye. The pricing of a new product is important to understanding, and capturing customer value. Customer value-based pricing, good-value pricing, value-added pricing, cost-based pricing, cost-plus pricing, competition-based pricing, and target-based pricing are involved in determining the pricing of a new product based upon the above criteria and situation. Careful monitoring of pricing can affect the product’s perception by the public.  Psychological pricing, reference pricing, promotional pricing, geographic pricing, uniform-delivered pricing, zone pricing basing-point pricing, freight-absorption pricing, dynamic pricing, and international pricing play roles in various demographics and economic environment to insure the pricing is competitive and profitable based upon the supply and demand of the product compared to the competition.

Pricing strategies such as market-skimming pricing, market-penetration pricing-low price for new product, product line pricing, optional product pricing, captive product pricing, by-product pricing, and product bundle pricing are used by all grocery stores form Safeway, Kroger’s, and Wal-Mart compete by their individual pricing strategy.

The marketing channels is used for the delivering of customer value by the aforementioned  supply chains, and value delivery network, channel behavior, channel design decisions, channel management decisions, marketing logistics and supply chain management.

In retailing, wholesaling is through specialty store, department store, supermarket, convenience stores, discount store, discount store, off-price retailer, superstore, factory outlet.

Communicating customer value through integrated marketing strategy is implemented with retailer marketing strategy, promotional mix, sales promotion, personal selling, public relations, and direct marketing; these have a wide variety of success depending on the product and target audience.

Advertising and public relations have the job of being informative advertising, persuasive advertising, reminder advertising, and advertising budget, creative concept, execution style, advertising media, public relations. There multitude of advertising agencies, organizations, and corporations are quite large, all competing to get the products business to help sell their breakfast product. Advertising executives use various types of selling, ranging from personal selling, and sales promotions. The sales force management, territorial sales force structure, product sales force structure, and outside sales force all utilize a wide range of selling techniques to promote and help sell the product for companies as Kellogg’s and Nabisco.

Advertising agencies have used direct and online marketing to build direct customer relationships through creation of competitive advantage.

Cereals today have penetrated into the global marketplace due to the internet. This new realm has opened up global marketing with global marketing firms in the worldwide economic community, economic environment, political-legal environment, and cultural environment. These environments have changed since the 19^th century when the first breakfast cereal Granola.

Quaker Oats (Anonymous, The Quaker(R) Brand Donates Two Million Bowls of Oatmeal to Help Feed Canadians In Need, 2011) has contributed to the sustainable marketing for social responsibility, and ethics by the donation of two million bowls of oatmeal to help feed Canadians. Quaker brand helped to support the food banks of Canada with nutritious breakfast during their hard economic times with assistance to over 700,000 people

Many corporations form Quaker, Kellogg’s, Nabisco, PepsiCo and others have found it to be excellent public relations, and a civic duty to help people out in time of disasters.  Corporations have come to realize that when you help people in a crisis that they will return the favor by buying your company’s products when their economic situation has improved in time.

The food industry has seen a 50 increase in costs associated with creating and marketing food for the public due to an increase in energy used to produce the goods, higher costs of water, labor, insurance, and transportation of goods. Advertising executives are aware of the decline in luxury breakfast goods, and has adjusted their campaign to emphasis high value for the increased prices. Corporations have been increasingly more vigilant with safety packaging of good with double seal, and damper proof of all consumable goods. This has given the public confidence that when they buy goods that are sealed, nutritional, and with an expiration date, they know that they can buy food with confidence and assurance that they will be getting a quality product they can depend. It is up to advertising and marketing agencies not only to sell the product, but to educate the public about the all the nutritional values, and need for such goods. With the decline in science education in our schools over the last few decades, advertising and marketing agencies are helping the public better understand what good nutrition is all about. Our changing society has demanded we market to the public food goods that are good for you, with low sodium, and fat content, lower cholesterol, and anti-oxidants. We are an overweight society with computer potatoes of people who are less active than ever due to the computer age. There has been considerable discussion of taxing “bad foods” such as fast food, and “junk food.” This will facilitate changes in the global marketing and advertising industry by companies such as PepsiCo, Quaker, and all the companies that have a diverse portfolio. People love fast food and junk food. It is up to corporations, advertising, and marketing firms to help consumers understand the need for a good diet through proper eating and exercise regiments. These facts have prompted advertising to promote foods that are good for you.

Miracle Noodles (www.miraclenoodles.com ) (Anonymous, Oodles of hope, not much health in 'Miracle Noodle', Jun 13, 2011. ) have been found to be a help to lower cholesterol as it is an insoluble fiber from whole grain with zero calories made from konjac glucomannan flour. These and other new products are facilitating changes in Americans diets which have seen 25% heavier people than 20 years ago with higher blood pressure, and medical problems. The power of the media, advertising agencies, and corporations will have a dramatic influence to help the Americans of today be healthier for the future.

Works Cited

Anonymous. (2011, Apr 20). The Quaker(R) Brand Donates Two Million Bowls of Oatmeal to Help Feed Canadians In Need. Canada NewsWire.

Anonymous. (Jun 13, 2011. ). Oodles of hope, not much health in 'Miracle Noodle'. The Providence Journal., p. p. D.5.

Banks, T. (2011, Dec 5). Kellogg's rebrands Nutri-Grain. Design Week.

Kotler, P. &. (2012). Principles of Marketing. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.

Walmsley, A. (2011, sept 28). A more refined site strategy. Marketing, p. 14.