University of Dayton Emerging Leader Program - Marketing Essentials

I'm catching up again as my company brick (the Dell) boots up on my most recent session of UD's Emerging Leader Program. This one was on Marketing Essentials and was a high level view of marketing and the various components of it.

Lots of discussion around the target customer (at the center) and then the 4 P's ( product, price, place, promotion) as well as environmental scanning and SWOT. These often seem like generally accepted practices but we discussed many companies that do not follow this properly.

Due to the volume of information given, we did not complete marketing plans during our session but this would be an area of improvement. We did review the plan structure but did not touch on one that I feel gets short shrift- FUNDING. The best marketing plan in the world is just a dream until it receives the proper amount of funding to make it happen. Research, ads, direct mail, trade shows, marcoms all take money. A lot of it!

Another common misconception about marketing plans is that they all must be measured in sales $. That is not allways true - often a plan is simply designed to build awareness or drive traffic to your trade show booth or website or storefront. Getting key organizational people to agree on this is quite difficult. Clarity should rule the day.

Overall a fun topic for me and I could go on 24/7/365 about it. More posts on my next sessions planned for later this month.

marketing VS Sales?

Recently I was finishing a strategic review where we are delving deeply into a particular market.  This task involved the review of the market, identifying trends and things all the way up to beginning to develop sales plans from the opportunities.

What I discovered was a tremendous disconnect between our strategic marketing folks and the sales folks - what a car wreck.

So I set about benchmarking this little divide and found that it exists almost everywhere. That struck me as very unusual as I feel sales and marketing are two very close departments.  In some companies, they are the same department.

I'll be researching this issue more in the weeks to come.  Right now I'm reading "On Marketing" - great stuff.  

Marketing and stuff

I'm reading a good book these days called "The Marketing Mavens" by Noel Capon. It is a pretty good book and it is based on the premise that very good marketing companies are really tuned into the markets they serve ( and don't serve) as well as letting Marketing Departments really drive business ( instead of just sending out newsletters).

This is a hard concept to grab since I work for a big multinational chemical company. We don't seem to embrace this concept very well. I'm going to do some benchmarking after I finish the book and hopefully we can adopt some of these concepts.


That's it for now...