Marketing Skills

“You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.”

Steve Jobs

Globalisation has led to a mature market which is flooded with products of all types produced in various corners of this planet. The availability of a sheer number of products means that customers have many choices. Customers never had it so good. Now they can explore a variety of competing products, consider buying them from a variety of retailers and distributors, online or offline.

All this means that those who want to sell in this increasingly crowded market must follow strategies that allow them to stand out from their competition. Employing simple sales techniques doesn’t cut it anymore. Successful sellers must now design their products in line with customer’s current and future needs as well as market trends and competition. Product design and marketing now go hand in hand to make sure that products are produced for the right market and in a way that will benefit their targeted customers.

In this course, delegates will be introduced to the entire process of marketing and see how each area can benefit their organisation. These areas are systematically explored and exercises are provided so that delegates can apply these techniques to specific scenarios or to their own organisation. Delegates will learn about customer’s decision making process, how to segment markets, how to target customers and how to define a marketing mix to target those segments. Many areas such as pricing strategies and various methods of promoting products are explored as well.

The course contains various optional exercises that can be used to easily extend the course to 1.5 days or more. The aim of this course is to familiarise delegates with what is involved in marketing using mainly qualitative methods and increase their awareness about various critical areas. This course can be particularly useful for those who are mainly involved in product design or management whose increased knowledge of marketing can help them to produce better products.

The course provides many opportunities to delegates to explore marketing methods used by their own organisations and critically evaluate them with the help of other delegates and the trainer. If delegates are from various organisations, this can provide a great opportunity to borrow marketing ideas from other industries which historically has been a great source of marketing innovation.

In this highly practical course delegates will learn:

Introduction to Marketing

• What is marketing?
• What are the historical approaches to marketing?
• How does modern marketing differ from historical approaches?
• What is involved in a marketing process?
• What techniques are used for situational analysis?
• How does marketing relate to sales and what does this mean when planning your strategy?

Understanding Customers

• What is a SWOT analysis and how can you take advantage of it in marketing?
• How customers decide?
• How can you influence customers in each stage of their decision making process?
• How to devise a marketing strategy to appeal to customers in each stage of their decision making process

Marketing Strategy

• How to segment the market
• How to target the market based on specific segmentations
• How to devise a marketing mix and position your products appropriately according to your target market
• What are various positioning strategies and what are their advantages and disadvantages?

Marketing Mix: Product

• What is the life cycle of a product?
• What to consider when developing products in line with your marketing mix

Marketing Mix: Price

• What is involved in the process of pricing your products?
• How to price your products in line with your objectives
• What legal issues should you be aware of when pricing?
• What are supply and demand curves and how can you use them when setting up your prices?
• Should you have variations of a single product? If so, how many?
• How to price multiple variations of a product to maximise your profit

Marketing Mix: Place/Distribution

• What is the importance of distribution and what is involved?
• What are various types of sales channels?

Marketing Mix: Promotion

• How can you promote your product?
• What are the 4 principal elements of promotion?
• How to use viral marketing
• What is involved in branding?

Marketing Analysis

• What are best practices in marketing?
• What are the critical areas in marketing that can make all the difference?

Audience: Anyone

Prerequisites: None

Course Duration: 1 Day

Course Level: Beginners & Intermediate

By the end of this course the delegates will be able to:

• Understand historical approaches to marketing and how marketing process works in practice
• Analyse your company in relation with your competitors and by examining your customers’ decision making process
• Segment the market, target each segment and use a marketing mix to address each segment as part of your marketing strategy
• Use product life cycle to decide on your marketing strategy
• Set your pricing strategy using a variety of methods and in line with supply and demand
• Identify distribution channels and setup various ways to get your products to customers ahead of your competitors
• Use four main elements of promotion to popularise your products
• Follow a number of well-established marketing guidelines to maximise your chances of success

Marketing covers many areas and this course is designed to cover a variety of topics. This is in particular useful for people who have little exposure to marketing and its significance in promoting the products and services of an organisation. For example, engineers, support personal, sales staff and sometimes even managers may not be involved in day-to-day marketing or have any say in the strategies made in a company. However, knowledge of marketing can significantly help them to understand the complexity and also the power it has over the success of a product.

Product designers should always consider marketing and selling products in line with technical requirements. Unfortunately many product designers are focused entirely on what they can produce and what technology can provide rather than focusing on what customers need and how they want to use the products.

Choices, Decisions, Where, When, What, Which Brand,...

The course comes with numerous carefully-design exercises aimed at making delegates think and question their current approaches. Many opportunities are provided for constructive discussions and brainstorming so delegates work on abstract problems as well their own marketing strategies. This allows them to immediately apply the techniques they learn in the course to their own organisation and question their marketing approaches. In our experience, this helps participants to get more from the course as they are constantly thinking on how to come up with new marketing ideas and in the process pay more attention to critical guidelines.