Marketing Management Notes For Bba

[Shawana Kallhoff]

LinkedIn and 3rd parties use essential and non-essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our Services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off LinkedIn. Learn more in our Cookie Policy.

The leadership group at Fulcrum recently took up the task of reading (or re-reading for some) High Output Management, the book written by Andy Grove in 1983 after his tenure as CEO of Intel. The book has been lauded since then, with updated editions coming in 1995 and 2015 (the latest features a forward by Ben Horowitz, an influential author in his own right).

I first read High Output Management years ago, probably after a specific struggle as an inexperienced manager scrambling for any advice on how to reign in the chaos of leading a marketing team. As I re-read it this time around within the context of my current role, I wanted to put some of my thoughts and reactions on the page to both clarify my own learnings and, hopefully, help other marketing leaders striving to get better.

We can also recognize that marketing is simply different than, say, product, engineering, sales, or customer service functions. It is subject to more opinions, luck, and more people challenges than any other area. A wise leader once remarked to me that marketing is the only job in the company everyone else feels qualified to do. When I share this comment with other marketers, most nod with a reluctant smile.

As a leader starts serving up marketing at any sort of scale, management becomes a team game. This could mean other functions, agency or other partners, direct reports, and if success and growth continues, an army of indirect reports. Regardless of the size and makeup, Grove provides some hard-earned lessons for playing properly.

The key to increasing output is increasing leverage. Grove urges leaders to relentlessly evaluate the use of their time and to increase productivity - the output per unit of managerial time - in three ways:

While positive leverage can go a long way as teams grow in their maturity and size, another key concept from the book is the downside of leverage. For one, there can be negative leverage from an ineffective manager. This comes from waffling, energy-sapping moodiness, and meddling.

Leading a team for marketers often means leaving behind the tasks and activities that led to dopamine hits. Leaders give away the credit and absorb the blame. Delegation is a form of leverage but to be an effective manager, you have to retain responsibility and ensure there are quality checks on both output and the team's decision making process.

Grove also makes a point that is incredibly important often overlooked or over-delegated: Training is the boss' job. This means that not only is the manager essential in making sure a new hire's task-specific training is executed well, a manager also has to constantly introduce and reinforce new ideas and principles for the team at large, regardless of tenure. I think for marketing, this is especially important. Understanding at a fundamental the strengths and weaknesses of a specific marketing strategy or tactic is key to increasing output. And the principles that guide marketing strategy - ideal customer profiles, positioning, measurement, and beyond - could not be more important to driving an effective team forward.

When it comes to managing performance of individuals, an important framework is "task-relevant maturity," which dictates the appropriate management style. If an employee has low task-relevant maturity, they need structured and task-oriented management. This means clearly defining the "what," "when," and "how" in detail. On the flipside, an employee with high task-relevant maturity, involvement by a manager can be minimal but is still guided by objectives that are monitored. The added dynamic in my experience is that over time, marketing task-relevant maturity is a spectrum that changes and needs to be reconsidered. If we add a new advertising channel, new type of marketing event, or engage a new data partner, the task-relevant maturity for the most impacted employees changes. As a result, finding the right approach to managing this maturity through grounded principles and monitoring can mean success or failure of the project.

• Define the proper places for the equivalents of receiving, in-process, and final inspect in your work. Decide whether these inspection should be monitoring or gate-like. Identify the conditions under which you can relax things and move to a variable inspection scheme.
• Define your output: what are the output elements of the organization you manage and the organizations you can influence? List them in order of importance.
• Analyze your information and knowledge-gathering systems. Is it properly balanced among headlines, newspaper article, and weekly news magazines. Is redundancy built in?
• Hold a scheduled one-on-one with each of your subordinates. (Explain to them in advance what a one-on-one is about. Have them prepare for it.)
• Look at your calendar for the last week. Classify your activities as low, medium, or high leverage. Generate a plan of action to do more of the high-leverage category.
• Define the three most important objectives for your organization for the next 3 months. Support them with key results. Have your subordinates do the same for themselves, after a thorough discussion of the top 3 set for yourself.
• Evaluate your own motivational state in terms of the Maslow hierarchy. Do the same for each of your subordinates.
• Classify the task-relevant maturity of each of your subordinates as low, medium, or high. Evaluate the management style that would be most appropriate for each. Compare your own style with what it should be.

The new economy is based on the Digital Revolution and the management of information. It is characterized by the Information Age, with promises of more accurate levels of production, more targeted communications, and more relevant pricing.

The old economy, on the other hand, was based on the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing industries, and standardization of products to achieve economies of scale. It is characterized by the Industrial Age, which focused on mass-production and mass-consumption with promises of efficiency.

The scope of marketing involves a broadened view of marketing (including goods, services, and ideas). Marketing entities have broadened to include marketing of goods, services, experiences, events, properties, people, places, organizations, ideas, and information. Responsibility of market managers has broadened to include demand management in which they seek to influence the level, timing and composition of demand. There are eight different states of demand that they can find and influence; each with corresponding marketing tasks:

Marketing tasks has earned a broadened view to include more decisions that vary in importance depending on the marketplaces they operate in: consumer, business, global, and nonprofit markets. For example, tools to better understand the customer are more important in consumer and business markets than in nonprofit and governmental markets where limited purchasing power is present.

Marketing Management refers to the art and science of choosing target markets and locking in and retaining customers, through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value.

A marketer is someone actively seeking one or more prospects for an exchange of values. A prospector has been identified as willing and able to engage in the exchange.

A need is a state of felt deprivation of some basic satisfaction. Wants are desires for specific satisfiers of needs. Demands are wants for specific products that are backed by an ability and willingness to buy them.

A value proposition is a set of benefits a company offers to customers to satisfy their needs. An offering is the intangible value proposition. A brand is an offering from a known source.

Exchange refers to the process of obtaining desired product from someone by offering something in return. Conditions when making exchange include that it is important to analyze the wants of both parties. If there is a sufficient match or overlap in the want lists, a basis for a transaction exists. A transaction is a trade of values between two or more parties. A barter transaction involves trading goods or services for other goods or services. Transfer (different from transaction) is the passing of a product without necessarily receiving anything tangible in return.

The ultimate outcome of relationship marketing is a unique company asset called a marketing network of mutually profitable business relationships. Competition is increasing between marketing networks; success depends on the better network.

Competition - Includes actual and potential rival offerings and substitutes. A broad view of competition assists the marketer to recognize the levels of competition, based on substitutability: brand, industry, form, and generic competition.

It is practiced mainly with unsought goods (insurance, encyclopedias), in non-profit areas (charity), and when a firm has overcapacity. High risks are involved since an unsatisfied customer can easily spread complaints to others.

Companies must carefully chose their target market, understand customer needs, engage in integrated marketing (having all departments of company work together to serve the customers interests) and finally produce profits by satisfying customers. Hurdles to adopting the marketing concept include organized resistance, slow learning, and fast forgetting.

5. Customer concept: shaping separate offers, services, and messages to individual customers, relying on the building of high customer loyalty and lifetime value. It requires large investments in order to gather the information, hardware and software.

c80f0f1006