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Organizational Plans. Even the organizing of the firm should be planned, as it is impossible to formulate an actual strategy, to develop and implement good operational plans without a thorough and efficient marketing organizing. Therefore the first thing a consulting management firm does is
to analyse the client-firm's organizing plan. .
The organizing plan implies the projecting of a marketing system adequate to the attaining of the firm's objetives. This organizing concerns both the compartments or divisions which carryon the marketing activity and the communication flows, decisional responsibilities and hierarchies which connect this compartiments to one another.
But management's most numerous problems and concerns are connected with the operation plans or the coordinated action programs, by which the respective organization operates in order to attain the stated targets. The action programs are developed at more frequent intervals and tend to consume more time and attention than organizational plans.
Permanent Plans. It is also necessary to point out the nature of the marketing policy concept, since it also belongs to the planning idea.
The policies are in fact permanent plans, meant to be repeatedly utilized, as long as the objectives are not modified and the environment does not change dramatically. The policies establish a framework of action and determine general work rules which, at the same time, represent solutions to the problems of repetitive character.
The Planning Phases
The planning process includes a series of stages which can be synthetized as follows:
_ analysing the present situation and reviewing the past performance
(company strengths and weaknesses);
_ identification and assignment of marketing opportunities; - identification and selection of specific targets;
_ selecting alternatives of efforts and resources required to reach the
targets;
- the choice of a general type of plan;
- integrating and coordinating the marketing mix;
_ monitoring and directing the plan; marketing control (audit and
adjustment). '
Despite the considerable importance of planning for marketing management, one must be fully aware that if the plans are not well worked out, instead of solving problems they create problems. A plan improperly conceived creates a worse situation for the firm than the lack of a plan. Plans usually go wrong because something that was not foreseen appeared in or changed the environment. This is an important reason for the constant monitoring of performance. A good marketing controls the gaps and defects in performance can be detected early enough to enable the market planner to make critical changes in the strategy and to avoid marketing failure and the disturbing or upsetting of the marketing plan.
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Goal-Oriented Marketing Management. As regards both strategy and planning, it is also necessary to add that they should not become an aim in themselves. They should be considered only the ways and means to reach an objective as the final target is essential. It is not strategy that is important, but the sales it leads to. It is not the marketing action program that is necessary, but the results that can be obtained by means of this program. The aim of marketing is to satisfy both the consumer and the profits of the firm and society, not the plans and strategies and the marketing policy in themselves.
Properly speaking, marketing policy is a system in which the decisions are arranged in the order of the levers which act for the maximization of the sales. These levers may refer alternately to the launching of a new product, the penetration into a market by a new distributing channel, the extension of the advertising, the lowering of the price etc. Thus if the point in question is a consumer product, packaged and cheap (as in the case of food products or chemicals etc.), the lever of the distribution methods and those of the advertising will be mainly used. In the case of a product of higher value, such as for instance ready-made clothes, stress will be laid on the product itsef, on the way it is displayed on its shape, style, fashion etc. and less on the advertising, because no advertisement in the world will make a consumer buy an inelegant suit of clothes.
Marketing Managem ent For The Market Segments
As customers differ, they are supplied with different products, differently presented, along different distribution channels, with different advertising messages. Generally speaking, the method for classifying buyers depends on the type of decision and of the marketing action conceived as well as on the characteristics of the market. But the old market segmentation criteria are unsatisfactory. The criteria of age and profession, for instance, have lost much of their discriminating power. Thus the mass of buyers is more and more considered in the perspective of a series of segments.
The segmentation of the market represents an original fundamental contribution which marketing has made to social sciences.
The segmentating of the market means the dividing of the market into grups of buyers, homogeneous both as regards their manifest characteristics and their mentality when buying. The groups are formed in such a manner that the variation between them should be as great as possible and the variation within each of them should be very slight. Consumers belong to a group according to their attributes and simple and stable characteristics.
To be or not to be the consumer of a product is a more important criterion for the study of the demand than the criterion of the dividing of the consumers according to the size of the locality or according to demographic criteria. In the present stage of methodology, the segmenting is carried out making use of the statistical data collected according to the old criteria, age, income, geographical region, social milieu, schooling, occupation etc. One of the important tasks of statistical methods is to discover the necessary techniques so that even the collecting of the information should be carried out according to the segmentation criteria based on the buying reasons or the attitudes of the consumers or their economic behaviour etc.
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The wish to buy might be for instance a segmentation criterion and then the consumers can be divided according to the degree of probability of the carrying into effect of the buying.
If the segmenting criterion is provided by the economic behaviour, the division into consumers and non-consumers can be adopted. The group of consumers is subsegmented into classes of constant and inconstant or changing consumers, and the group of the non-consumers in classes such as: potential consumers (in a distant future) and determined non-consumers.
The segments of buyers can be successive as in the case of fashion, when the "innovators" group which appears at the beginning is followed by contagion rfrom one to another, and so on.
I Certain segments accept, for instance, the modifying of a product while
others do not; some be influenced by the commercial advertising broadcasted by the radio, others by the advertising used by T.V. etc.
As a consequence of the market transformations and of the different marketing actions such as advertising, selling efforts, services at home, various measures aimed at promoting sales, price reductions etc., the buyers' attitudes and intentions change and therefore, the buyers' segments modify accordingly.
A Radar For Top Management
At the end of these remarks concerning the problems of marketing management in the context of the papers read at the Prague Seminar, it is necessary to add that marketing provides an inexhaustible source of data for the managing, of functioning firms and for the guiding of the firm like a radar and like a prompt signaller for unforseen situations which occur in sales or on the market. Through the researches and studies carried out with the aid of marketing concepts and analytical techniques, on the bases of the pertinent and adequate information, optimal decisions can be made for the solving of the arisen problems and the very important operations of the control of these decisions can be executed.
MARKETING SYSTEMS AND STRATEGIES (THE TIMISOARA CONGRESS)
INTRODUCTION
The first Romanian Marketing Seminar-Congress was held in a festive setting, in the town of Timisoara, a beautiful city in Western Romania and the chief town of the Banat province (Ist-Jrd July, 1971).
This Seminar-Congress had a particular significance still valid today too. It represented the crowning of the efforts of the I.M.F., in order to set up the Romanian Marketing Association. The sympathy and good will, shown by