MANAGEMENT NOTES

INTERNATIONAL MARKETING VS. DOMESTIC MARKETING           Marketing is a comprehensive term and it includes all resources and a set of activities necessary to direct and facilitate the flow of goods and service from producer to consumer in the process of distribution. Kotler defines marketing as the set of human activities directed at facilitating and consuming exchanges. The essence of marketing is exchange of product and the transaction is to satisfy human needs and wants. All business activities helping and promoting the exchange function are included in marketing. He says that “marketing deals with identifying and meeting human and social needs.” One of the shortest definition of marketing is ‘meeting needs profitably.’ This definition of marketing applies to both domestic as well as international marketing. In both, success depends to a large extent upon satisfying the basic requirement of the consumers. This necessarily involves f...

NATURE OF INTERNATIONAL MARKETING   (1) Credit-Oriented: Information marketing is of credit-oriented nature in which developed countries keep a broader share. Because of low purchasing power in developing countries, these countries prefer to purchase goods from those countries who provide them credit facilities and keep their interest rate minimum. (2) Dominance: Dominance is a common feature in international marketing. Developed countries have a dominant role in world trade who holds 75 percent business of total world trade. Because of technical efficiency and superior quality, they are able to provide best products and services. (3) Protectionism: Protectionism is a common feature in international marketing. Usually every country tries to increase its exports and reduce its imports. Therefore, planning and implementation of all marketing efforts is done keeping in view this goal. (4) Political Nature: Political relations between nations also play a vital role...

INTERNATIONAL MARKETING        International marketing deals essentially with the trade patterns among the various countries of the world. It also considers the trade policies and trade practices of the various countries as these govern the buyer-seller relationship in the international market. Terpastra has called international marketing “It is comprehensive in that it covers the problems of marketing across national boundaries as well as those arising from marketing within a number of different national markets. It treats at length the situation of the domestic firms which is exporting, but also analyse in detail the need of those firms which assemble, license or produce in foreign market. In other words, international marketing considers the full range of international marketing involvement from the exporter to the multinational firms.”         According to Hess and Cateora, “International marketing is the per...

OBJECTIVE OF MARKETING AUDIT       Marketing audit serves the following objectives: 1. Evaluating all the marketing activities of the company. 2. Assessing the company’s objectives, policies and strategies and their basic assumption. 3. Exploring opportunities and resources to improve company’s performance and profits. 4. Identifying the marketing weakness and problems of the company and taking measures for improvement.

CHARACTERISTICS OF MARKETING AUDIT 1. Periodic: Marketing audit should be conducted regularly and not just merely at the time of crisis. In all situations marketing audit can benefit the companies to improve the situation. 2. Comprehensive: Marketing audit extents to all the marketing activities of the company. If it confines to only few activities, it would be called functional audit. Although functional audit is useful, sometimes is may mislead to management, as it may not be able to detect the root cause of the problem. 3. Independent: Although marketing people from within the company can conduct marketing audit. However, there will be more predictability, and objective if it is conducted by an independent and experienced consultant. 4. Systematic: The marketing audit is a systematic examination of organisation’s environment, strategies and objectives. The audit indicates the most needed improvement, which can be incorporated in the short and loge term improve...

ESSENTIAL OF AN EFFECTIVE MARKETING CONTROL SYSTEMS         Marketing managers should employ an effective control system to make sure that activities and result confirm plans. Effective marketing control system should be based on the following characteristics: (1) Suitability: Marketing control system should be appropriately designed to suit the nature and needs of the activities to be controlled. This means that different type of activities require different types of control. (2) Understandable: Marketing manager must understand what the control system is attempting to do. They must have thorough knowledge before operating the technique. Without proper understanding of the technique if manager use sophisticated control tools will have adverse consequences. (3) Prompt Reporting: Marketing control system should report deviations promptly so that corrective action are effected with minimum cost and inconveniences. Timeliness is the es...

BENEFITS OF MARKETING CONTROL            Marketing control plays an important role in marketing planning and its successful implementation. The benefits of control are listed below: 1. Marketing control helps in keeping all marketing operations in right direction. 2. It helps in improving the performance of marketing department. 3. Effective control systems help marketing manager to delegate his authority to the lowest possible extent. 4. It helps in better utilization of marketing resources resulting in increase in the productivity and profitability of marketing department, which contributes significantly in the progress of business. 5. Marketing control improves the effectiveness of marketing planning. In fact both go hand to hand. Control is the only means to ensure that the plans are being implemented. It also points out the shortcoming of planning. 6. It minimize the chances of mistakes being reputed i...

CONTROL OF MARKETING OPERATIONS         Marketing control is an essential part of the marketing function. All the marketing activities are planned and implemented with the objective of achieving marketing goals. Marketing control provides the means whether the desired goals have been achieved or not and if necessary, applying corrective measures so that the performance takes place according to plans. In involves determination of standard of standard and yardsticks, gathering information on marketing performance, doing comparison to identify deviations and suggest corrective measure whenever these are needed. Marketing control is a step through which the success of marketing efforts can be assessed, present and prospective problems could be identified and steps are taken to resolve them in order to achieve marketing goals. It aims to improve productivity and profitability of all marketing activities.         ...

TRENDS IN ORGANISATION         Over the last decades, significant changes have taken place in the business environment, such as Globalization, Information Technology Revolution and market fragmentation. In order to take the advantages new opportunities prevailing in the environment, organisation are also responding with changing strategies. Some of the important trends are: 1. Organisation restructuring with more customer orientation and breaking the walls of departments. 2. Outsourcing by buying goods and services from outside venders. 3. Benchmarking best practices to improve performance. 4. Doing strategies alliance with vendors. 5. Working more closely with customers to add value to their operations. 6. Increasing numbers of mergers, takeover and amalgamations to gain economies. 7. Globalizing with effort to think global and act local. 8. Flattening with reducing the number of organisational levels to get closer ...

TYPES OF MARKETING ORGANISATION          A medium or large sized company can organise its marketing department on different bases depending upon its nature and marketing plans. The company may organise its marketing functions in one of these forms of structure: (1) Function Based Marketing Organisations: This structure is widely used by medium sized company. This structure is most suitable for the organisation that are smaller in size, dealing in limited number of product and do not have much technical difference. Function of similar nature are grouped in a single unit with a view to give a definite direction to the whole group. A business enterprise may group its activate under various departments like production, marketing, personnel, finance etc. Marketing function may be divided into product planning, marketing research, advertising, sales, customer service etc. Each function is assigned to a specialist who report to the marketin...