Basic Marketing Series
Bonnie Feigenbaum is a Senior PR Consultant with TNKR Media, former Town Councillor and Chief of Staff to a Federal MP. She has almost 30 years of teaching experience, creating, and delivering courses at five post-secondary institutions, including McGill’s Desautels School of Management. She is a bilingual, marketing and communications professional with 15 years of participation in local politics and almost 40 years of community involvement.
Through Bonnidée Services, her own boutique communications company, she has been responsible for all aspects of the strategic plan for a wide range of clients, specializing in government relations and stakeholder management.
Her teaching philosophy, EDU-TAINMENT, is rooted in flexibility and adaptability using a three-pronged approach of presentation, practicality, and participation to integrate real-life experiences in marketing, communications, politics, and business to create a dynamic environment within a theoretical base.
1. Principles of Marketing
In this lecture, I will be giving you an overview of the principles of marketing. The marketing process will be where we start to demonstrate a relationship between several concepts we will be discussing, during this LECTURE series. Marketing at its most basic level aids in the exchange of value between producers and consumers and whenever two parties exchange, they have a relationship. In the first lecture, the focus will be on the aim of marketing, to generate profitable relationships, by understanding customer needs, designing customer-driven marketing strategies & managing those connections.
2. Marketing Environment
To create effective marketing strategies that connect with your target, leveraging the opportunities in your industry which utilize your company’s strengths most effectively, you must first understand the environment in which marketing operates. In this lecture, internal and external stakeholders that can impact on a company’s microenvironment will be covered. As well as the key macroenvironmental forces that produce opportunities to action on and threats thus must be mitigated will be discussed.
3. Marketing Information Systems
Explaining how we use the secondary data to develop marketing information systems will be the theme of this lecture. How to develop those marketing information system and acquire the data points to help management develop actionable customer insights will be emphasized. As well as the different research options to collect, manage, and analyze data about crucial elements in their market space.
4. Buying Behaviour
In this lecture, we delve into Consumer Buying Behaviour. The aim of marketing is increase consumers awareness and create positive thoughts and feeling towards our company. Ultimately, the goal is to modify their consumer’s behaviour, so they consider our product, service or idea and then modify their actions, by buying our product, service or into our ideas. We will first look at the B2C (Business-to Consumer) model, comparing it with B2B (Business-to-Business) and B2I (Business-to-Institutional) Buyers’ Behaviour decision processes.
5. Segmentation Strategy
The segmentation and positioning process that work in cohort with the company’s marketing strategy is the core of this lecture. This will cover how to choose which factors we should use to divide our market base as well as determining which segment to target. This allows the company to answer the question of who to serve. We use the insights gained through research to answer the question how to serve the chosen clientele and shape marketing strategies to distinguish ourselves from our competitors and create real unique value for our TARGET customers.
6. Product
The focus here will be on the definition of product, discussing the three levels of a product, the major classification of products and services as well as the additional consideration services marketing requires. Product attributes, mix decisions and branding strategies will be overviewed.
7. Price/Place
In the special 2 for 1 lecture, we will begin with a comparison of the three major pricing strategies and delve into product mix pricing and price adjustment strategies. Markets channels functions, organization and alternatives will be overviewed as well as a brief discussion on marketing Logistics (Supply Chain Management).
8. Promotion
Companies need to communicate the value they have created to their target market. Here we will review the five elements of a carefully blended integrated marketing communications (IMC) plan. Advertising, Promotions, Direct Marketing, Personal Selling and Public Relations will all be discussed. The major decisions involved in developing a clear, compelling, consistent communications strategy will be reviewed.
9. Marketing Strategy
The marketing strategy and planning are all guided by the organization’s overall strategic plan. We will first discuss those strategies and the importance of partnerships in creating customer value. We will then examine how the choice of target markets influence a myriad of decisions in the development of the marketing offerings, mix and program.
10. Marketing Plan
In our final lecture, we will put it all together and review all the concepts as we go through all the elements of the full marketing plan report. We will review the marketing management functions including how to prepare the report. The importance of control; measuring and managing the marketing return on investment (MROI) as well as other marketing metrics will be explained.