In today's competitive, customer-driven world, marketing is everyone's job-whether you work in manufacturing or sales,management or engineering. This hands-on guide covers theessential topics and tools every business person needs to under-stand and utilize in order to win and keep customers. By explor-ing fundamental concepts like aligning business and marketing strategy and cutting-edge ideas in the areas of branding, differ-entiation, pricing, and Internet marketing, Marketer's Toolkit showsreaders how to:
Target high-potential customer segments
Size up competitors
Allocate marketing resources wisely
Develop and execute effective marketing plans
The Harvard Business Essentials series is designed to provide com-prehensive advice, personal coaching, background information, and guidance on the most relevant topics in business. Drawing on rich content from Harvard Business School Publishing and other sources,these concise guides are carefully crafted to provide a highly practi-cal resource for readers with all levels of experience, and will prove especially valuable for the new manager. To assure quality and accu-racy, each volume is closely reviewed by a specialized content adviser from a world-class business school. Whether you are a new manager seeking to expand your skills or a seasoned professional looking to broaden your knowledge base, these solution-oriented books put re-liable answers at your fingertips.
Introduction
Marketing Strategy
How It Fits with Business Strategy
What Is Strategy?
The Strategy Process
Where Marketing Fits In
Marketing Strategy and Product Life Cycles
Summing Up
Creating a Marketing Plan
An Overview
From Strategy to Plan
Implementing Your Plan via the Marketing Mix
Controlling Plan Implementation
Summing Up
5 Market Research
Listen and Learn
Formal Market Research
Two Formal Methods for Analyzing
Buyer Preferences
Informal Research Methods: Close Customer Contact
Summing Up
4 Market Customization
Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning
Segmentation
From Segmentation to Targeting
Positioning
Summing Up
5 Competitor Analysis
Understand Your Opponents
Who Are Your Competitors?
Characteristics for Analysis
Porter's Five Forces Framework
Summing Up
6 Branding
Differentiation That Customers Value
Differentiation of Commodity
Products and Services
Approaches to Differentiation
Differentiation That Matters
Summing Up
7 The Right Customers
Acquisition, Retention, and Development
Customer Economics
Customer Retention
Customer Development
Summing Up
8 Developing New Products and Services
The Marketer's Role
The Two Types of New Products
Extending Product Lines into New Segments
The New-Product Process
The Marketer's Role
Your New-Product Strategy
Beyond New
Summing Up
9 Pricing It Right
Strategies, Applications, and Pitfalls
Cost-Plus Pricing
Price Skimming
Penetration Pricing
Exploiting the Experience Curve
Prestige Pricing
Bait and Hook Pricing
Price Promotions
Customer-Perceived Value: The Ultimate Arbiter of Price
Pricing and the Product Life Cycle
Sunmming Up
10 Integrated Marketing Communications
Creativity, Consistency, and Effective Resource Allocation
The Goal of Marketing Communications
Communication Vehicles
Putting It All Together
The Management Challenge
Summing Up
11 Interactive Marketing
New Channel, New Challenge
Growing Online Sales
E-mail Marketing
Web-Based Merchandising
Summing Up
12 Marketing Across Borders
It's a Big, Big World
Product Decisions
Promotion
Place (or Distribution)
Price
Controlling Global Marketing Decisions
Summing Up
15 The Future of Marketing
Tomorrow's Challenges
Today's Buyers Have More Information
Delivering on the Promise
Cutting Through the Clutter
Market Fragmentation
Measurement and Accountability
The Ethics of Marketing
Summing Up
Appendix: Useful Implementation Tools
Notes
Glossary
For Further Reading
Index
About the Subject Adviser
About the Writer
