Page 14 - MYM 2015

spotting, competition and industry audits, visual design and motion graphics, and creative ideation. CRM skills are rapidly being added in marketing departments to create an advantage over competitors working at grosser levels of targeting.
• Partner relationship management – As more companies team up with partners to perform more activities, the skill of managing partner relationships becomes critical. Partner productivity depends on both participants feeling satisfied with the terms of the relationship and the opportunities that result in working closely with the firm. A company should appoint someone to manage supplier relations
and another to manage distributor relations, very much like a human resources department manages employee relations.
• Company contact center – Companies need
to consolidate activities for reaching, hearing
and learning about customers through what
has been described as a contact or customer interaction center. All the information coming from customer touch points, such as the telephone, regular mail, e-mail, faxes and store visits needs to be integrated, and companies need to capture information that will provide a 360-degree view of the individual customer.
• Internet marketing –Virtually all companies have created a website where viewers can learn about the company’s product line, history, philosophies, job opportunities and recent company news. Dell Computer, Amazon, W.W. Grainger and scores
of others go further and use their websites
as a sales channel. But there are many other marketing applications for such websites that most companies have not yet tried: market research, competitive intelligence, concept and product testing, coupon distribution and employee and dealer training, for example.
• Public relations marketing – Long a stepchild in the promotion mix, public relations is coming into more prominence. Hi-tech firms discovered early on that PR skills are critical to spreading information about new products. These firms would submit new hi-tech products to well-known reviewers, hoping to receive from them a positive recommendation. Companies need to add PR skills to the marketing department and not rely
on begging and borrowing them on an as-needed basis from the company’s PR department or an outside agency.
• Service and experiential marketing – Outstanding service can be a powerful differentiator for a company in the absence of other differentiators. Companies that win high marks for service, such as The Container Store and the Ritz-Carleton Hotel Chain, practice values-driven leadership, strategic focus and brand cultivation. Service marketing has been lifted to a new level by the recent work of experience marketing. Great restaurants, for example, are known for the customer experience as much as they are for the food they serve. Similarly, Starbucks is “allowed” to charge coffee drinkers $2 or more to experience coffee in a special setting.
• Integrated marketing communications – Among the most important skills in marketing are communication and promotion. Communication is the broader term and it happens whether planned or not, like a salesperson’s choice of clothingto wear or the company’s office decor. All of these things create impressions on the receiving party. This explains the growing interest in Integrated Marketing Communications. Companies need to orchestrate a consistent set of impressions from personnel, facilities and actions that deliver the company’s brand meaning and promise to its various audiences.
• Profitability analysis – Most companies don’t have the capabilities to assess their
real profitability by geographies, products, segments, customers and channels. More often than not, they assume their profits are proportional to sales volume. But this ignores the different margins and cost structures for different-sized customers. Marketers must add profit measurement and financial skills to increase the department’s accountability for budget allocations over geographies, products, segments, customers and channels.
• Market-driving skills –Effective marketing has traditionally been defined as the ability to “find needs and fill them profitably.” But with so many needs now being filled by countless products, today’s challenge is to invent new needs. Market- driving firms revolutionize industries by creating a new value proposition or a new business system that offers greater benefits. Many competitors may imitate the new value proposition but they tend to be less successful in copying the business system. Market-driving firms – like Federal Express and
14 I October 2015