Marketplace Success
For me, marketplace success is achieved when a company knows what their product and brand is, identifies their target market successfully, knows what features and benefits their product offers, and uses all these to promote a clear and consistent message which eventually translate into sales.
Promotions
Promotions is the use of media vehicles to let people know or be aware about a product or brand. Promotions can be anything from TV advertisements, posters, flyers, marketing stunts, booths, endorsements, billboards, etc. Promotions is important for marketplace success because without it, it is impossible to let people know the differentiating factors that the product or brand has compared to its other competitors. With so many competitors in the market, promotions allows a company to differentiate themselves and provides the venue for the company to send the marketing message they want to convey to the public. Promotions is closely connected to an identified target market. Knowing the target market allows marketing efforts to be more fine-tuned to the characteristics and lifestyle of the target market. A challenge with promotions is to decide which venues would make the most impact. In the case of Origin Organics, we had to debate which promotions (sampling booths, merchandising, etc) was the best way to increase brand awareness.
Target Market
Having a target market means knowing who you want your product to be geared towards to. Knowing your target market allows a company to narrow its marketing efforts thereby decreasing marketing expenses while increasing marketing effectiveness. With a target segment, a company can have focus and know which actions to pursue. Target markets can be easily be dismissed but will actually give a company much more focus. A challenge in clarifying a target market is that most companies think that having a "everyone is our target market" is better than being specific because intuitively, having everyone as a consumer should mean more sales. However, what I gained from working with Origin Organics is that it’s hard to do promotions or positioning without a target market just because you don’t know what marketing actions to take. The only way to identify your target market is to sit down, do primary and secondary research, and ask a lot of questions about what the company wants to achieve.
Positioning
Positioning is where the company tries to create a specific image or identity of the brand or product to the consumers. Positioning is important to marketplace success because with all the brands out there, a company has to make sure that their brand is positioned in the way the company wants it to be. Being positioned allows consumers to understand the brand against competitors and can also help the brand be better remembered. A challenge to positioning is the difficulty of deciding where the brand should be positioned. For instance, our group was tackling what message Origin Organics should send in their promotions. Should we position ourselves as a local company or as a very sustainable company? If both, which one should be the primary one? Basing our decision on the research we gathered, which showed that most people value locally grown produce as more important, being locally grown was one of the message we chose.
Product Type
I also realized the importance of product type. Whether the product was a low involvement or high involvement product greatly affected the product's promotions. A low-involvement product meant that promotions had to be more emotional than factual. If facts were presented, facts had to be presented in a way that was easy and short to read. People didn’t really want to read a long list of reasons of why to buy the brand. Knowing this can greatly help companies with their promotions and make better marketing decisions that lead to marketplace success. In choosing what marketing venues to use, we had to consider that tomatoes were a low involvement product and so they commonly weren’t given a lot of thought when being purchased, we decided that some marketing venues were better than others. Providing wallpapers around the superstores that detailed the technological aspects of the sustainable program of Origin Organics wasn’t as effective as a simple blow up of a sliced tomato that showed what benefits and features the consumers could get out of it. The later was more visual, more eye-catching, shorter, and better. We also decided that using social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) wasn’t as effective as using taste test, which allowed consumers to actually taste and interact with these low involvement products.
Brand Equity
Brand equity is how the brand is perceived, its awareness, its personality, who it is. It’s important for marketplace success because companies that have a lot of good brand equity usually are the brands that are well-known and usually bought by consumers just because consumers know what the brand is all about. Origin Organics had low brand equity. Not a lot of people were even aware that they existed. What I learned was that promotions are closely tied to brand equity. If the marketing message is consistent, brand equity will eventually build up and consumers will eventually know what the brand stands for. A challenge is that brand equity takes a long time to build and making sure that the brand logo, slogan, and other marketing campaigns are consistent with each other takes a lot of effort.
Summary
This project allowed me an opportunity to learn a lot of about different marketing concepts and their importance in making marketing choices. Promotions, targeting, product type, positioning, and brand equity are all important factors to consider for an organization's success in the marketplace.
