Marketing Principles #1

[samvara]

It has to be said there's a reason I'm doing this in 11th place and that's because I wanted as much background as possible before launching into the marketing unit. meep.

I'm sorry to say the LMS of choice Moodle is unable to let me download PDFs on my iPad - there was a short, glorious period in which I could but this appears to have changed. I've tried Safari, Atomic and Mercury - if there's a magic browser you know about - please tell me!

We did a fun icebreaker exercise doing a 60 second introduction of a partner in the class aimed at marketing them - in retrospect working out who we were trying to sell them to would have helped :p Oh well, it was fun and a chance to jump in. I now have some notes on how I'd market myself in a job interview taken as we did a quick review of who and what stood out (all the things you'd expect by the way: being recent, previous familiarity, association with sport, humour, repetition, attractive language, startling things)

I ordered Strategic Marketing: the text online, I can easily save up to 30% on the price even with delivery costs but given the text wasn't officially confirmed until quite recently I'll be behind on the readings for the first couple of weeks.

We talked about why do marketing and the important of value cunningly illustrated by the below

• Value is critical for the customer
• Value is critical for the company
• Value is difficult to comprehend:
  • Which is the best quality car in the world?
  • Which is the most expensive car in the world?
  • Which is the most valuable car in the world?

We talked about all the things that can be marketed: Goods, Services, Events and experiences, People, Places and properties, Organizations, Information, Ideas, Political marketing, Demarketing, Social marketing

I like the idea of demarketing, where you try to reduce demand for something.

Marketing Myopia (PDF) by Theodore Levitt got a lot of love - apparently everyone in the business world was struck by it - in fact I think I may have read it before... it's quite readable if you're curious.

We then had a sweeping introduction to Markstrat in which we will (in our teams) be making business decisions and fighting each other for market share over the next 12 weeks. The advice to ignore online 'tips' was delivered a little late - I'd already had a bit of a look around - but I'm suitably intimidated by the prospect of being bombarded by information and having to claw some meaning from it.

All in all a good start, I went in not sure if I was going to find energy and found myself enthused.

Comments

[callistra]

Cool
:) sounds like it might be a lot of fun

[samvara]

I was pleasantly surprised, and my team is frantically emailing about our Markstrat team - we are hyper!

[callistra]

Woohoo! That's really awesome!