Archive for August, 2011
By Bradly Montague President & CEO NOMAMONT, Inc.
Branding is all the rage; therefore, people are tempted to think that it is a new idea. A commonly used term in marketing, branding is often the subliminal process by which a business employs marketing strategies to guide people to easily remember their products and services over a competitor’s. Essentially, it’s applied psychology. Branding is also a method to leverage success, expand market share, and fend off competition. The problem is, companies are turning to branding as a panacea and the cold, hard fact is branding will not create a spike in cash flow or market share. Therefore, it makes sense to understand that the purpose of branding is not to make your target market choose you over the competition, but rather to urge your prospects to see you as the only solution to their problem.
A strong brand is invaluable, as the battle for customers intensifies day by day. Brands of the future will be those able to surround their products and services with ardent advocates and loyalists: passion brands. All other brands will be left to compete in the price wars. It is important that the online and offline images of your business be harmonious and that time is invested in researching, defining, and building your brand. After all, your brand is your promise to your consumer. Your brand resides within the hearts and minds of customers, clients and prospects. It is the sum total of their experiences and perceptions regarding your company, some of which you can influence, and some that you cannot.
How do you connect with the consumer when they’re calling all the shots? View your consumers as both customer and collaborator and employ game-changing thinking. In order to change the game, you need to audit how you think, comparing rational versus intuitive decision-making strategies and identifying common mistakes made by even the most experienced professionals. The process is based on the premise that the answers to your company’s brand strategy reside in the heads of the CEO and the key management group. Your company’s brand strategy must be owned by every employee from the top down. Eleven key attributes necessary to become a passion brand include:
1. You must recognize that your brand is a key asset in delivering strategic targets at a level that is higher than the industry standard.
2. Do not consider the brand as merely a communications issue—your brand must be recognized as the key platform to link the company strategy with customers and employees.
3. Make sure your brand management processes are integrated seamlessly into the company’s processes—i.e., “branding” is not a separate activity.
4. Your senior management is accountable for the brand’s continued health—brand responsibility resides at C-level.
5. All of your employees need to share a belief in the brand as well as a common understanding of the brand. With this mindset in place, the power of the brand will act as an incentive to employees.
6. Ensure your employees’ activities are aligned with the brand values and contribute to the building and strengthening of the brand.
7. Your employees should be measured and rewarded by the success of these brand-guided activities.
8. Your marketing department must be able to talk in terms of expected return on their investments and marketers must be able to leverage customer insights to make the most effective marketing decisions. Future strategy should be built based on knowledge of the customer, product and practices.
9. All marketing activities should be closely aligned with the core brand values.
10. It is necessary to invest in sufficient IT capability to capture data on customers, segment customers in order to efficiently respond to their needs, and implement marketing techniques to deliver increased ROI.
11. You must identify your company’s brand equity (the financial value of your brand) by understanding the brand’s value drivers and the levers required to influence these drivers. This action leads to success.
International Marketing
Guided by :Dr.Jelsy joseph
Director,Dept of management studies&research
KARPAGAM UNIVERSITY,COIMBATORE
International marketing refers to MARKETING carried out by companies overseas or across national borderlines . Companies must consider language barriers, ideals, and customs in the market they are approaching. International marketing is simply the application of marketing principles to more than one country. At its simplest level, international marketing involves the firm in making one or more marketing mix decisions across national boundaries. At its most complex level, it involves the firm in establishing manufacturing facilities overseas and coordinating marketing strategies across the globe.
Elements of the international marketing mix:
The “Four P’s” of marketing: product, price, placement, and promotion are all affected as a company moves through the five evolutionary phases to become a global company. Ultimately, at the global marketing level, a company trying to speak with one voice is faced with many challenges when creating a worldwide marketing plan. Unless a company holds the same position against its competition in all markets (market leader, low cost, etc.) it is impossible to launch identical marketing plans worldwide.
Product
A global company is one that can create a single product and only have to tweak elements for different markets. For example, Coca-Cola uses two formulas (one with sugar, one with corn syrup) for all markets. The product packaging in every country incorporates the contour bottle design and the dynamic ribbon in some way, shape, or form. However, the bottle or can also includes the country’s native language and is the same size as other beverage bottles or cans in that country.
Price will always vary from market to market. Price is affected by many variables: cost of product development (produced locally or imported), cost of ingredients, cost of delivery (transportation, tariffs, etc.), and much more. Additionally, the product’s position in relation to the competition influences the ultimate profit margin. Whether this product is considered the high-end, expensive choice, the economical, low-cost choice, or something in-between helps determine the price point.
How the product is distributed is also a country-by-country decision influenced by how the competition is being offered to the target market. Using Coca-Cola as an example again, not all cultures use vending machines. In the United States, beverages are sold by the pallet via warehouse stores. In India, this is not an option. Placement decisions must also consider the product’s position in the market place. For example, a high-end product would not want to be distributed via a “dollar store” in the United States. Conversely, a product promoted as the low-cost option in France would find limited success in a pricey boutique.
After product research, development and creation, promotion (specifically advertising) is generally the largest line item in a global company’s marketing budget. At this stage of a company’s development, integrated marketing is the goal. The global corporation seeks to reduce costs, minimize redundancies in personnel and work, maximize speed of implementation, and to speak with one voice. If the goal of a global company is to send the same message world wide, then delivering that message in a relevant, engaging, and cost-effective way is the challenge. Effective global advertising techniques do exist. The key is testing advertising ideas using a marketing research system proven to provide results that can be compared across countries. The ability to identify which elements or moments of an ad are contributing to that success is how economies of scale are maximized. Market research measures such as flow of attention & flow of motion and branding moments provide insights into what is working in an ad in any country because the measures are based on visual, not verbal, elements of the ad.
Advantages of international marketing
Product Issues in International Marketing
Product Need Satisfaction. We often take for granted the “obvious” need that products seem to fill in our own culture; however, functions served may be very different in others—for example, while cars have a large transportation role in the U.S., they are impractical to drive in Japan, and thus cars there serve more of a role of being a status symbol or providing for individual indulgence. In the U.S., fast food and instant drinks such as Tang are intended for convenience; elsewhere, they may represent more of a treat. Thus, it is important to examine through marketing research consumers’ true motives, desires, and expectations in buying a product.
The International Product Life Cycle (PLC). Consumers in different countries differ in the speed with which they adopt new products, in part for economic reasons (fewer Malaysian than American consumers can afford to buy VCRs) and in part because of attitudes toward new products (pharmaceuticals upset the power afforded to traditional faith healers, for example). Thus, it may be possible, when one market has been saturated, to continue growth in another market—e.g., while somewhere between one third and one half of American homes now contain a computer, the corresponding figures for even Europe and Japan are much lower and thus, many computer manufacturers see greater growth potential there. Note that expensive capital equipment may also cycle between countries—e.g., airlines in economically developed countries will often buy the newest and most desired aircraft and sell off older ones to their counterparts in developing countries. While in developed countries, “three part” canning machines that solder on the bottom with lead are unacceptable for health reasons, they have found a market in developing countries.
Branding. While Americans seem to be comfortable with category specific brands, this is not the case for Asian consumers. American firms observed that their products would be closely examined by Japanese consumers who could not find a major brand name on the packages, which was required as a sign of quality. Note that Japanese keiretsus span and use their brand name across multiple industries—e.g., Mitsubishi, among other things, sells food, automobiles, electronics, and heavy construction equipment.
PROMOTIONAL ISSUES
Promotional objectives. Promotional objectives involve the question of what the firm hopes to achieve with a campaign—“increasing profits” is too vague an objective, since this has to be achieved through some intermediate outcome (such as increasing market share, which in turn is achieved by some change in consumers which cause them to buy more). Some common objectives that firms may hold:
Legal issues. Countries differ in their regulations of advertising, and some products are banned from advertising on certain media (large supermarket chains are not allowed to advertise on TV in France, for example). Other forms of promotion may also be banned or regulated. In some European countries, for example, it is illegal to price discriminate between consumers, and thus coupons are banned and in some, it is illegal to offer products on sale outside a very narrow seasonal and percentage range.
Language issues. Language is an important element of culture. It should be realized that regional differences may be subtle. For example, one word may mean one thing in one Latin American country, but something off-color in another. It should also be kept in mind that much information is carried in non-verbal communication. In some cultures, we nod to signify “yes” and shake our heads to signify “no;” in other cultures, the practice is reversed. Within the context of language:
Writing patterns, or the socially accepted ways of writing, will differs significantly between cultures.
Pricing Issues in International Marketing
Price can best be defined in ratio terms, giving the equation
resources given upprice = ——————————————— goods received
This implies that there are several ways that the price can be changed:
Reference Prices. Consumers often develop internal reference prices, or expectations about what something should cost, based mostly on their experience. Most drivers with long commutes develop a good feeling of what gasoline should cost, and can tell a bargain or a ripoff.
Reference prices are more likely to be more precise for frequently purchased and highly visible products. Therefore, retailers very often promote soft drinks, since consumers tend to have a good idea of prices and these products are quite visible. The trick, then, is to be more expensive on products where price expectations are muddier.
Marketers often try to influence people’s price perceptions through the use of external reference prices—indicators given to the consumer as to how much something should cost. Examples include:
CULTURE OF INTERNATIONAL MARKETING
Culture is part of the external influences that impact the consumer. That is, culture represents influences that are imposed on the consumer by other individuals.
The definition of culture offered one text is “That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man person as a member of society.” From this definition, we make the following observations:
Culture has several important characteristics:
(1) Culture is comprehensive. This means that all parts must fit together in some logical fashion. For example, bowing and a strong desire to avoid the loss of face are unified in their manifestation of the importance of respect.
(2) Culture is learned rather than being something we are born with. We will consider the mechanics of learning later in the course.
(3) Culture is manifested within boundaries of acceptable behavior. For example, in American society, one cannot show up to class naked, but wearing anything from a suit and tie to shorts and a T-shirt would usually be acceptable. Failure to behave within the prescribed norms may lead to sanctions, ranging from being hauled off by the police for indecent exposure to being laughed at by others for wearing a suit at the beach.
(4) Conscious awareness of cultural standards is limited. One American spy was intercepted by the Germans during World War II simply because of the way he held his knife and fork while eating.
(5) Cultures fall somewhere on a continuum between static and dynamic depending on how quickly they accept change. For example, American culture has changed a great deal since the 1950s, while the culture of Saudi Arabia has changed much less.
CONCLUSION
If the exporting departments are becoming successful but the costs of doing business from headquarters plus time differences, language barriers, and cultural ignorance are hindering the company’s competitiveness in the foreign market, then offices could be built in the foreign countries. Sometimes companies buy firms in the foreign countries to take advantage of relationships, storefronts, factories, and personnel already in place. These offices still report to headquarters in the home market but most of the marketing mix decisions are made in the individual countries since that staff is the most knowledgeable about the target markets. Local product development is based on the needs of local customers. These marketers are considered polycentric because they acknowledge that each market/country has different needs.
Affiliate marketing can be one of the very best ways to generate an income by working from home in your spare time. Of course, the more you put into your affiliate marketing efforts, the more you’ll get out of it – but even if you only have a little time to invest, you can still make some money in this business. If you want to really make it big in the world of affiliate marketing, you’ll need to put some hard work into it. In this article, I’ll give you a brief explanation of what affiliate marketing is and give you several tips on succeeding in affiliate marketing – including one very valuable piece of information; namely, the best affiliate internet marketing tip I ever got from anyone.
So what is affiliate marketing? Basically, it is a business venture where you, the affiliate, marketing a product or service for someone else, the merchant, by directing traffic to their website. Each time a visitor you have directed to their website makes a purchase, you will be paid a commission. The first thing you’re going to need is your own website – this can be done for free; although free websites look less professional, it’s better to go for a site of your very own.
You’ll need to choose an affiliate program next, preferably one that fits into an interest or area of knowledge you are already familiar with. It’s always easier to sell a product that you personally use and enjoy. You’re going to need to have content on your site that will draw traffic from people in your target market. Make sure you write informative, useful content which will catch the attention of readers and make them want to visit your site. If you are not confident in your writing skills, you can hire a copywriter to do this work for you. This content will help to establish you as a trusted expert in your niche; and everyone is more likely to buy a product or service which carries the endorsement of an expert.
You can write this content in the form of articles, which can be placed on your own website as well as submitted to the many free article directories online. These articles can contain a brief bio and a link to your site; when they are picked up for publication by other websites, e-zines and the like (and if your articles are well written, they will be), your link will be out there giving your site exposure and boosting your search engine ranking. Be sure to look into keywords which will be likely to be used by people in your target market when searching for your type of product or service and incorporate these keywords into your website content and articles. This will be a great help in making your site easier for prospective customers to find using search engines.
Now for the most important tip – the best affiliate internet marketing tip I ever got: This is simple but true; treat your affiliate marketing venture like a real business, it will reward you like one. If you want to make it big, you will have to put in some hard work to grow your affiliate marketing business. Don’t expect to get rich in a week if you’re only willing to spend a few hours working on it! Work hard and be consistent, and you’ll get to enjoy the rewards of your labour.