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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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INTRODUCTION

1 THE SCOOP

3

Chapter 1: Functional Overview 5

Brand Management . . . .6

Advertising . . . .7

Affiliate/Property Marketing . . . .9

Price Marketing/Sales Forecast . . . .9

High-tech Marketing . . . .10

Marketing Consulting . . . .11

Direct Marketing . . . .12

Media . . . .13

Public Relations . . . .15

Marketing Research . . . .17

Marketing Case: Creating a Category . . . .19

Chapter 2: Building Your Marketing Foundation 21 The Marketing Mindset . . . .21

Three Crucial Marketing Frameworks . . . .25

What is a Brand? . . . .29

Top 13 Ways to Revitalize a Brand . . . .30

The Basics of Advertising . . . .32

Evaluating an Ad . . . .34

The Medium is the Message . . . .36

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Vault Career Guide to Marketing & Brand Management Table of Contents

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GETTING HIRED

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Chapter 3: Hiring Basics, Resumes and Cover

Letters 41

Qualifications . . . .41

Is Marketing Right for You? . . . .42

How to Create a Winning Resume . . . .44

Cover Letters that Kick Butt and Take Names . . . .45

Networking and Headhunting . . . .48

What Should I Look for in a Marketing Company? . . . .49

Marketing Case: Creating Consumer Demand . . . .51

Chapter 4: The Interview 53 The Inquisition . . . .53

What You Can Do to Prepare . . . .55

General and Behavioral Questions . . . .55

The Case Interview . . . .58

Marketing Case: Building a Sustainable Brand . . . .63

ON THE JOB

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Chapter 5: Job Responsibilities 67 Key Responsibilities and Duties . . . .67

A Day in the Life of an Assistant Brand Manager (sort of) . . . .70

A More Realistic Look at a Day in the Life of a Brand Manager . . . .71

The Functions of the Brand Manager . . . .74

Chapter 6: Career Path & Lifestyle 75 The Traditional Brand Management Career Path . . . .75

Lifestyle . . . .76

Marketing Case: Brand Repositioning . . . .80

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Vault Career Guide to Marketing & Brand Management Table of Contents

APPENDIX

83

Marketing Jargon/Buzzwords . . . .83

Selected Reading . . . .87

Major Marketing Employers . . . .91

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Are you fascinated by the endless variety of products you pass on your trips down supermarket aisles? Do you like to scrutinize particularly eye-catching cereal boxes or shampoo bottles? Do you watch TV advertisements and think about what type of consumers they are targeting, and how they are accomplishing their goals? Do you see those endless spin-offs of existing products, and think you can come up with better versions?

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MANAG

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THE SCOOP

Chapter 1:

Functional Overview

Chapter 2:

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Imagine for a moment that you own a company. How do you make money? You sell products and/or services to buyers. It’s not quite as easy as that, however. You’ve got competition—people who sell the same or similar things as you do. How do you stand out from your competition and influence buyers to spend their money with you?

This is where marketing comes in. It is both an art and a science; skilled marketers use market research as well as their own experience observing consumer behavior to create winning marketing strategies. The goal is to increase sales. Since increased sales equals increased profit, it’s easy to see how important the marketing function is. Each company’s organizational structure and type of customer defines the specific role marketing will play there.

Companies market and sell to other businesses, intermediaries, or directly to consumers. Business to business companies sell goods and services such as office furniture, copiers and payroll preparation services to other businesses; intermediaries sell to buyers who aren’t the end user. For example, textbook publishers sell to professors, who require them for students enrolled in their courses, and pharmaceutical companies market to physicians who prescribe their drugs for their patients. Direct-to-consumer marketers such as Disneyland and Jackson Hewitt Tax Preparers sell directly to consumers.

Many companies, of course, sell to a variety of audiences. Procter & Gamble, for example, sells its products to mass-market stores such as Wal-Mart and also advertises its products directly to consumers. While the particular audience influences how a product is marketed, the specific marketing function remains the same: craft a message and advertise it in a way that drives sales and ultimately increases profits.

Careers within the marketing/branding area can be high-profile. The business world realizes that strong brands and solid marketing programs drive shareholder value, and that companies can no longer make fundamental strategy decisions without truly understanding how to market a product. Companies only make money when they sell the products and services they create. Today’s business challenges—the push for company growth and profit, industry consolidation and deregulation, the emergence of new channels and technologies and the general state of the economy—make marketers even more valuable.

Functional Overview

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Vault Career Guide to Marketing & Brand Management

Functional Overview

Getting down to basics

A marketer can have various titles. Consumer products companies, such as Procter & Gamble and Unilever, most often use brand manager (and its variations including associate, assistant and senior). Financial services and tech companies such as Ernst & Young and Intuit commonly use product managers, and a broad variety of companies use marketing managers.

While the marketing function is a critical part of any business, the marketing department doesn’t always carry the same amount of responsibility in every company. The career path of a company’s top management can yield some clues about this. If a number of its past presidents have spent part or all of their careers in marketing, it’s a safe bet that the department wields more influence within the company as a whole. But if company leaders hail from operational or financial departments, then it might be that marketing doesn’t hold the same internal status as some other departments.

Brand Management

Taking charge of a brand involves tackling many diverse job functions—and different subspecialties. Decide where you’d like your main concentration to lie.

The scoop

The core of brand work is brand strategy. Brand managers must decide how to increase market share, which markets and demographic groups to target, and what types of advertising and special promotions to use. And at the very heart of brand strategy is identifying a product’s “brand identity.” Brand groups then figure out how to exploit brand strategy, or, in some cases, how to change it. For example, Coach has taken its traditionally-styled, high-quality brand of leather goods and turned it into a high-fashion purveyor of not only handbags but clothes, accessories and shoes. TBS, a popular cable television network, rebranded itself as the “very funny” channel featuring reruns of “Sex and the City,” “Seinfeld,” “Friends” and “Everybody Loves Raymond.” In both cases, the brands have benefited from a shift in brand identity, and consequently, a shift in their market. Brand identity is normally created and confirmed through traditional print, radio, and TV advertising. Advertising is usually produced by outside agencies, although brand insiders determine the emphasis and target of the advertising.

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Functional Overview

Are you a big-league brand manager?

In a typical brand management organizational structure, positions are developed around responsibility for a particular product rather than a specific functional expertise (i.e. you’re an assistant brand manager for Cheerios). This structure enables you to be the “master of all trades,” acquiring an expertise in areas such as manufacturing, sales, research and development, and communications. In brand management, the marketing function is responsible for key general management decisions such as long-term business strategy, pricing, product development direction and, in some cases, profit and loss responsibility. Brand management offers a terrific way to learn intensively about a particular product category (you could be a recognized expert on tampons!) and to manage the responsibility of running a business and influencing its performance.

Some liken a brand manager to a hub at the center of a hub and spoke system, with the spokes going out to departments like finance, sales, manufacturing, R&D, etc. It is the job of the brand manager to influence the performance of those groups—over whom he or she has no direct authority—in order to optimize the performance of his or her brand or product line. For more in-depth information about brand management careers, see Chapters 5 and 6.

Advertising

The scoop

If you’ve ever read a magazine, watched television, listened to the radio, driven on a highway or surfed the Internet, you’ve undoubtedly been exposed to some form of advertising. When you want to tell the world about your new product or service, you advertise—you create a specific message that talks about your product or services’ benefits, why it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, and why everyone should buy it. It takes many forms, from a television commercial to a flyer posted in a dorm hallway, and can cost millions of dollars to ten cents a copy.

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and in-house creative staff, who work on nothing but their employer’s business (such as Aetna Healthcare—they have an in-house creative department that produces a large percentage of their advertising).

Are you an advertising ace?

If you thrive in an active, sometimes chaotic, environment, enjoy working with many different departments, and can multi-task with the best of them, advertising may be for you. Agencies look for people who can keep their eye on the ball and are extremely organized, as you have to know what is happening with all of your projects at all times. Account executives are assigned to one or several accounts depending on the size of the agency. In larger agencies, there may be more than one account executive on an account. AEs (as they are called) are part of a larger account team that can include an account supervisor and account director.

As an account executive, your role is to serve as a liaison between your brand management client and the departments within your agency. Account executives manage the creative production process from beginning to end, from researching what benefits a product offers, to writing the strategy for a typical commercial. Account executives must also handle matters such as briefing the creative department on how to execute the advertising strategies, working with the media department to buy ad time or space, and determining how to spend the marketing budget for advertising. (Will potential consumers be best reached via TV, outdoor billboards, print or radio—or through a general saturation campaign?) Along with managing the creative process, account executives at ad agencies are increasingly becoming strategic experts in utilizing traditional media, digital media, direct marketing and other services.

A good account executive should be very organized and willing to “roll up [his] sleeves to get the job done,” according to Joseph, a VP of Business Development with a large agency. An entrepreneurial outlook is a must as well: “The best account people are able to see the client’s business as their own.”

Functional Overview

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A Look Inside Advertising

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Affiliate/Property Marketing

If you’re working with a major brand company like Nike, Disney, Pepsi, or L’Oreal, chances are you’ll do a lot of cross-promotion, or “affiliate marketing.” For instance, Nike has marketing relationships with the NBA, NFL, and a variety of individual athletes and athletic teams. Disney has a strong relationship with McDonalds; cute toys from the entertainment company’s latest flick are often packaged with McDonalds Happy Meals upon the release of each new movie. L’Oreal works with celebrities like Heather Locklear and sponsors events such as the annual Academy Awards.

Marketers must manage the relationship between any two entities. If Disney wants to promote the cartoon du jour with McDonalds, or Pepsi wants to make sure that all Six Flags theme parks have a Pepsi Ride, then marketers ensure both parties are getting what they need out of the deal and staying true to their own brand image.

Price Marketing/Sales Forecast

Pricing is largely driven by market pressure. Most people, for example, won’t pay more than $2.00 for a hamburger in a fast food restaurant. On the other hand, brand managers always have some pricing leeway that can greatly affect market share and profitability. An increase of a nickel in the price of a product sold by the millions can make huge differences in revenue—

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Functional Overview

assuming the price rise doesn’t cause equivalent millions less of the products to be sold. Brand managers need to figure out the optimal pricing strategy for their product, though it’s not always a case of making the most money. Sometimes it makes more sense to win market share while taking lower profits. How do brand managers justify their prices? Through extensive research. Paper towels, for example, may be much more price-sensitive than a luxury item like engagement rings or smoked salmon.

Brand and marketing managers don’t always have free reign over pricing. At some companies, such as those that sell largely through mail order, or those with complex pricing systems, pricing and promotional offers may be limited to what the operational sales system can handle. Explains one marketing manager at a long-distance phone company (an industry with notoriously tangled pricing plans): “It’s very easy to offer something to the customer. It’s very difficult to implement that in the computer system.”

Another large part of the general management duties of brand managers is forecasting product sales. This means not only keeping track of sales trends of one’s product, but anticipating responses to marketing campaigns and product launches or changes. The forecasts are used to determine production levels. Once a year, brand groups draw up budgets for their production, advertising and promotion costs, try to convince the finance folks that they absolutely need that amount, get less than they ask for, and then rework their budgets to fit the given budget. As one international brand manager at one of the world’s biggest consumer goods companies puts it: “You don’t determine the production and then get that budget; you get the budget, and then determine the production.”

High-Tech Marketing

Not everyone markets applesauce for a living. Many people choose to enter the world of high-tech marketing because they want to work with products and technologies that reshape and improve the word around us. These marketers feel that they would rather change the way a person interacts with the world in a sophisticated way, rather than spend time understanding what hair color teenagers find most appealing. High tech marketers spend much of their time understanding research and development issues and working on new product launches.

Technology companies like Intel, Dell, and Microsoft have recognized the power of branding and are utilizing traditional marketing tactics more and more. Amazon’s extensive marketing campaign in 1998 helped brand that

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Functional Overview

company in the mind of consumers still new to e-commerce as the company to purchase books (and other products) online. Intel became perhaps the first semiconductor company readily identifiable to the public through its heavily branded “bunny people.” Marketing in the high tech world will continue to grow in importance over the next decade, as technology companies become more consumer-oriented (see Microsoft’s X-Box). Marketing a service or software product versus a more tangible product is a bit different. It may be a bit more challenging to understand how consumers relate to the product. Inventory and distribution issues may be tracked differently.

Marketing Consulting

Although most well-known consulting firms are known for their expertise in general strategy, many consulting firms now hire industry or functional experts that focus on marketing issues. These firms need people with expertise in the areas of branding, market research, continuous relationship marketing, pricing strategy, and business-to-business marketing—they tend to hire people with previous marketing experience and value consultants who have been successful marketing managers and have lived through the full range of business issues from the inside. McKinsey and Monitor are two general strategy firms that have begun to hire marketing specialists. Other boutique marketing consulting firms, such as Kurt Salmon, focus on certain product categories like beverages, healthcare, and retail. All major ad agencies are also attempting to reinvent themselves as marketing partners focused on marketing strategy beyond simple advertising.

Are you a marketing consultant?

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Direct Marketing

The scoop

Direct marketing truly means what it says: it is any marketing that is directed specifically to you. In industry terms, it is commonly referred to as ‘one to one’ marketing, whereas television, print, billboards, etc. are referred to as ‘one to many.’ Pottery Barn, for example, sends you a catalog. Amazon.com sends you an e-mail announcing a promotion. These are sent to you directly because you fit a certain set of criteria that they have defined as their target market. Product marketers determine these criteria through demographics, psychographics and by using third-party customer databases. For example, let’s say you just purchased some dishes at Williams-Sonoma and you signed up for their catalog. Williams-Sonoma also owns Pottery Barn, and the folks at Pottery Barn think you might be interested in purchasing some other furnishings for your home. That’s how you came home to a Pottery Barn catalog in your mailbox.

At Amazon.com, you browsed for some books and placed some in your shopping cart. Based on what books you purchased, you received specific offers for products that other people who bought similar books also purchased. Those offers are sent to you directly based on your specific

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A Look Inside Marketing Consulting

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behavior. That is the goal of direct marketing—speaking to the specific user in a more targeted way. Unlike some brand marketing, the effect of which can be difficult to measure, direct marketing allows you to see the results of any particular campaign by its response rate (believe it or not, in many cases 1 percent is considered a very good response rate)! Like brand marketing, however, direct marketing can be expensive.

Are you a direct marketing dynamo?

As a direct marketer, you need to possess a creative eye as well as critical thinking skills, and look forward to seeing direct results from your work (as in, “great, this direct mail piece got great results” or “oh no—this piece performed pretty terribly”). Above all, be curious; look at a problem from lots of different angles; and take ownership for solving it. The best performers have a high sense of responsibility and accountability.

Functional Overview

A Look Inside Direct Marketing

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Media

The scoop

The media department can often be the first stop on the young advertising exec’s career path. It provides a good overview of different advertising venues, from television and magazines to outdoor (billboards, bus stops, kiosks) and on-line. In this department, there are generally two functions: media planning and media buying. In some agencies, the same person might do both. Media planners are responsible for spending their client’s media budget in an effective and efficient manner. L.L.Bean, for example, spent over $ 27 million in media in 2004—and with the right planning, that money can buy a lot of ad time and space. It is up to the media planners, buyers and their team to figure out exactly how to spend that money, where to spend it (television? magazines? online?) and how quickly to spend it. Media buyers work closely with these different media outlets to negotiate the best advertising rates on behalf of their clients. After spending time learning media, many people move on to the account side of the business, as an assistant or associate account executive.

Are you a media maven?

To be successful, you can’t be afraid of numbers. But this isn’t high-level calculus we’re talking about. The numbers refer to client budgets, television ratings points, magazine and newspaper circulation, consumer impressions, cost per thousand (CPM), syndicated research and more. Many agencies have their own way of determining the optimal combinations of media and dollars, but you need to consider the most current ratings figures—many of which are released twice a year by third-party research companies such as Simmons or MRI-and advertising rates. To be a killer media buyer, you need to know how to negotiate with the different sales reps to get the best prices per advertising spot for your client. While you certainly won’t make much money as an entry-level media planner (and most often, the starting point in the department is as a planner, not a buyer), you make up for it in free lunches, dinners and goodies that the different ad sales reps from various media outlets who want you to place your client’s media budget with them bestow on you throughout the year!

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Public Relations

The scoop

We’ve all heard the term ‘buzz,’ but what does it mean, exactly? Think about the proverbial water cooler, and the things people talk about while there. Television networks want people to talk about their new show. Chefs want people to talk about their great new restaurant. Handbag designers want their bags to be the new hot thing. All of these businesses recognize that strong word-of-mouth is the most effective advertising there is, and it’s the public relations professional’s job to generate as much of it as she can for her clients.

Whether it’s getting coverage in a national magazine or on a local talk show, public relations is about persuading public opinion. Think of political campaigns, non-profit organizations, and special events—the success of these organizations is largely driven by positive public opinion, and many times advertising is too expensive or not effective enough on its own to move the

Functional Overview

A Look Inside the Media Department

While the media department is often where you’ll begin before moving to another department, many people choose to build their career there. Pamela, now a media supervisor with a large Chicago ad agency, started there after college as an assistant media planner. She was promoted within the department, and as a supervisor, now heads a team of planners. Her team is responsible for developing strategic media plans for several products owned by a large consumer packaged-goods company. Pamela describes her job as “exciting because you are totally plugged in to the consumer culture, because you have to understand everything you can about the people who buy your client’s product.” Specifically, “what magazines do they read? What TV shows do they watch? What web sites do they surf? Where do they buy the product-at the grocery store, drugstore, Wal-Mart or Costco?” Pamela warns, however, that the hours can be “pretty intense” during client planning-that is, when the client prepares its annual budget.

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needle. When a political candidate is photographed with a community leader and that photograph appears in the paper, that’s PR at work. When a celebrity is involved in a scandal that could damage his career, it’s up to the public relations professionals to do damage control. Martha Stewart is a great example: the domestic diva spent time in jail and emerged with an arguably stronger image than she went in with! That is the magic of public relations.

Are you a PR pro?

You must be able to write well (preferably in the Associated Press style, the standard writing style for the industry-check appendix for details) and manage your time effectively to meet ever-present deadlines. Expect the unexpected and never assume anything, since clients can be very demanding. You need to be enthusiastic and proactive, and willing to conduct seemingly mundane tasks on some days and stretch yourself to new heights on others.

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A Look Inside PR

Jason, a vice president of a worldwide public relations firm based in New York, got into PR after working at an advertising agency just after graduation. He worked as an account executive, then decided to switch over to the public relations arm of the agency, and has continued to his present position working with consumer electronics clients. “I love the fact that I get paid to read my favorite magazines and experiment with the latest tech gadgets.”

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Marketing Research

The scoop

Marketing is both an art and a science. Sometimes, a lot of what looks like art has been researched via consumer focus groups, questionnaires, proprietary studies and syndicated research, to name a few. Some companies, such as Kellogg’s and P&G, have sophisticated market research departments where new product concepts, product names, and market positioning are tested. Other companies outsource their marketing research to firms who are experts in the field. Some companies, usually smaller ones who might not have the budgets for it, don’t do any market research at all and instead adopt the philosophy of “throw it out there and see what sticks.”

Needless to say, marketing research can be a very quantitative discipline. However, it usually involves a good understanding of consumer behavior, and learning how and why people buy what they do. The trick is finding ways to use this information to sell more product. Researchers who find that consumers prefer cleaning products with “antibacterial” benefits listed on the label will recommend to brand managers that they incorporate this benefit into their products and convey it on the label.

Are you a marketing research whiz?

If you find yourself interested in the “why”s of marketing more than the “how”s, you may be happier in a marketing research role. Although it may sound like a somewhat dry area, it’s usually pretty fascinating and in many companies it is among the most important, and high-profile, departments. Working within a company’s marketing research department or for a marketing research firm will expose you to many different companies and research methods.

You need to be a detective. If your team is working on new product development, you might need to look for specific patterns in consumer behavior to find out what needs aren’t being met (and therefore, what products the public needs and will pay for). For example, P&G actually places a research professional into a person’s home to shadow them while he goes about his daily routine-cleaning the house, shopping for food, and other assorted tasks. The researcher will thus get a first-hand view of what drives a person’s buying decision and what needs she might have (and, by extension, what products P&G could develop). Vaseline examined how people were using their product, and discovered that many people used it to soothe

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chapped lips—so they created a smaller, portable tube for that purpose. If you are finding out what customers of an existing product are saying, you need to ask the right questions to get the most specific answers. Projects can be team-based, with senior and junior analysts (or research managers, another common title). You’ll usually be working on several projects at once and dealing with different departments, which is a great way to build relationships across the company or with client companies. You’ll earn a competitive starting salary, and since you’ll be working with a lot of data, you’ll most likely need to know the basics of Microsoft Excel.

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A Look Inside Market Research

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Functional Overview

Marketing Case: Creating a Category

iPod—do YOU have one? 42 million of your friends and neighbors do!

Launched in 2001, Apple Computer’s iPod was designed as a portable mp3 player (for those of us who might not be clued in, mp3 is a method of storing and listening to music as digital files). While there were a few already on the market, the iPod soon set the standard and has since evolved into an entire media platform, creating a whole new product category along the way.

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Surveys on thousands of top programs

College • MBA • Law School • Grad School

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The Marketing Mindset

The best marketers are sensitive to cultural trends. A skilled marketer is a bit of a cultural anthropologist—she loves to watch how people do things, asks why they do the things they do, and creates products and services that can make a person’s life easier. Marketers must not only identify cultural trends, but also develop implications of these trends and determine how these implications might alter how a product interacts with and relates to consumers.

Societal trends

The first part of understanding your market is understanding what broad social trends may affect it. Below are some major trends you should be attuned to as a marketer.

• Family fragmentation: Divorce rates remain at high levels. Working mothers with young children are now common. According to the U.S. Census Population Survey, single parent households increased by 27 percent between 1970 and 1994. About half of American children live in homes without their natural fathers. Only 20 percent of American families sit down to dinner together.

• Workplace/technological dynamics:Corporate downsizing is a constant, while freelancing and working part-time are more common. Technology’s evolution has produced advances in cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), scanners, faxes, e-mail and instant messaging. The result is a mobile office, where workers can never truly be “off the clock.” In fact, devotees of the Blackberry, a popular accessory that combines a cell phone with an address book and e-mail function, liken it to an addiction, where they are constantly checking e-mail and text messaging throughout the day and night.

• Privacy and piracy: The phrase “identity theft” has become a common term in our collective vocabulary, and one that strikes fear in people. As an increasing part of people’s lives happen online (banking, shopping, emailing, entertaining), more and more information about us is available

Building Your

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Building Your Marketing Foundation

online too. Scam artists find ways to capture this information and use it to apply for credit cards, tap into bank accounts and wreak havoc in general. Computer software packages that check for such intrusions are brisk sellers, and e-mail marketers must comply with strict regulations to keep people’s private e-mail addresses just that—private. Caller ID is a standard feature on today’s telephones, and in turn many people are masking their phone number so that the caller ID feature can’t read it!

• Salad bowl:The term “melting pot” used to refer to the increasing ethnic and religious diversity found in the United States. “Melting pot” implies that distinct cultures are being pushed together and forced to conform to standards. America now publicly embraces diversity and claims that all people can live together peacefully. There is a rise in the number of multi-ethnic celebrities and supermodels, and fashion, culinary, and musical tastes from cultures ranging from China to India to Mexico have made their way into the American mainstream.

Consumer buying trends

Societal trends lead to consumer trends—ways in which consumer behavior can be analyzed. Product development is driven by consumer trends. Twenty years ago, no one craved a “sport utility vehicle.” Now SUVs are all the rage with posturing motorists tackling the wilds. Recently, consumers have gone gaga over fruit and vanilla scents. Changing customer needs and whims means brand groups must constantly monitor their own market share and product, and the innovations of their competitors.

Product development managers live in horror of missing out on the Next Big Thing. At the same time, sinking company resources into chasing a short-lived fad means career disaster. To help divide the blips from the long-term consumer trends, marketers must pay attention to developments in fields such as nutrition and public safety. Technological innovations, such as the development of a new fabric like Polartec or Tencel, can also effect lasting changes in consumer behavior. Though R&D scientists make these breakthroughs, it is up to brand teams to bring them to the market, devising the types of products to use the new technology, and deciding how to sell the public on the new offering. As with societal trends, we will give some examples of consumer trends.

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Convenience

Whether it is because they are increasingly busy or because they’d rather be doing other things, consumers demand a quick and painless shopping experience.

• Starbucks and McDonalds are introducing their own convenience cards— cards that hold value and provide a quick way to pay for products.

• Online bill payment is becoming more common, and consumers save time by not having to write checks, address envelopes, find stamps and remember to drop off the mail.

• Delivery options abound, with many local supermarkets offering home delivery

Stress relief

Stress is the root of all evil. Although that’s a bit of an exaggeration, today’s consumers feel stressed out by their jobs, finances, and family. Products that promise stress relief are more popular now than ever.

• Aromatherapy and scented candles sell briskly

• Holistic therapies such as acupuncture and osteopathy are becoming more mainstream

• Yoga and meditation are more popular now than ever (in 2003, over 20 million Americans practiced some form of yoga, according to WebMD)

• Greater number of people taking anti-depressants

High quality, low price

American consumers are more demanding than ever. They seek out “better products, better quality and better taste at a competitive price,” according to

Brandweek. And everyone wants a bargain—consumers do their research to

find the best deals on many products they buy.

• IKEA furniture

• Home Depot

• Costco

• Wal-Mart

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Ego gratification

People want to feel special, and companies are catering to their egos by personalizing an increasing array of products, and offering consumers the chance to make their own specific products

• iPod

• Sneakers and athletic jerseys

• Dell computers

• Jo Malone perfumes—combine scents to find your favorite

Forever young

Both women and men are seeking more ways to halt or at least slow the aging process. Growing old gracefully isn’t seen by much of society as a positive attribute, and people are doing things later in life.

• Cosmetic surgery is more common, with patients having multiple procedures and starting at a younger age

• Wrinkle-preventing sunscreen is an ingredient in a growing number of products

• Women in their late 40s are bearing children

Do-it-yourself design

A man’s home is his castle, and if he can learn easy and inexpensive ways to decorate it, all the better. Reality shows that document home makeovers for the lucky participants are plentiful, as are magazines that bring interior decorating to the masses and stores that show you how to do it yourself.

• DominoMagazine

• Trading Spacestelevision show

• Home Depot

• Pottery Barn

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Three Crucial Marketing Frameworks

When you’re performing a marketing analysis, you should always be asking the same key questions:

• What are the major problems, opportunities, and threats facing the company?

• What’s your strategy to address these issues?

• How much money will you need to make to make this strategy profitable?

• Why did you choose this strategy?

• How will you execute this strategy? What choices do you recommend for the marketing mix and tactics?

The 4Cs, 5 Ps, and the break-even economic analysis will help you organize these questions and are a great way to begin analyzing a situation.

The 4Cs

The 4Cs should be used when performing a market assessment and background evaluation of the situation at hand.

Context

• Consider macro-economic factors as well as other external factors (industry, consumer trends)

Company

• Organization’s mission/objectives/strategy

• Strengths and weaknesses

• Basis for competitive advantage

• Financial and other performance indicators

• Brand/product specifics

Customer analysis

• Target customer

• Consumer segmentation

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• Buying behavior (How often do they buy? What quantities do they buy at one time? Is it an impulse or planned purchase?)

• Latent or unmet consumer needs (Can you own something that no competitor has capitalized on yet?)

Competitor analysis

• Basis of competition

• Degree of rivalry

• Major players and anticipated new entrants

• Competitor positioning

• Strengths/weaknesses of competitors as well as opportunities and threats

• Company specifics that might affect competition in the future (cost structure, change in focus)

The 5Ps

The 5Ps should be used when you’re ready to recommend a plan of action and create marketing mix specifics.

People

• Market selection

• Customer segmentation

• Estimation of market size

Product

• Positioning

• Product benefits (both tangible and intangible, in other words, functional AND emotional)

• Brand equity

• Packaging

Price

• Recommendations should consider unit cost, perceived value pricing (e.g. premium pricing for prestige)

• Skim vs. penetration pricing

• Price leader vs. price follower

• Role of consumer price promotion

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• Elasticity analysis

Place/Distribution

• Channel selection

• Channel power and control (brand/store loyalty)

• Channel margins

• Channel support (financing, training)

Promotion

• Marketing message/motive (awareness, interest level, trial, repurchase, loyalty issues)

• Medium (TV, magazines, billboards)

• Pull and/or push strategy

Break-even analysis

The break-even analysis should be done to determine:

• Whether a company should enter a new market with a product

• How many units a company needs to sell of a certain product to break even or be profitable

• How much market share a brand will need to make the launch financially successful

• What margins the manufacturers and retailers will need to secure

Example:

Hasbro is deciding whether to start manufacturing their Mr. Potato Head Doll in Peru. They hope to sell the doll to local retailers for $23.00. Retailers in this market like to have a 40 percent margin on the goods they sell to customers.

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Step 1. Break-Even Volume (in units) = Fixed Costs

(Unit Selling Price - Variable Cost per Unit)

Example: Fixed Costs = $30,142

($23- $5.25) $17.75 Break-Even Volume = 1,698 dolls

Step 2. Break-Even Market Share = Break-Even Volume (in units) Total Market Size (in units) Example: Break-Even Volume = 1,698 dolls (previous analysis)

Total Market Size 20,000 dolls Break-even market share = 8.5% market share

Step 3. Unit Contribution = Unit Selling Price - Variable Cost = Unit Contribution

Example: Unit selling price/doll = $23.00 - Variable costs - $5.25 Unit Contribution = $17.75

Step 4. Total Contribution = Unit Contribution x Volume Sold = Total contribution to overhead and profit

Example: Unit Contribution = $17.75 (previous analysis) x Volume x 3,800 dolls

Total Contribution = $67,450 Total Annual Contribution

Step 5. Unit Cost (at a given level = Variable Cost + (Fixed cost/forecasted of volume) unit sales)

Example: Variable Cost = $5.25 + ($30,142/3,800 dolls) + Fixed Cost/Unit Sales

Unit Cost = $13.18 is the cost per unit at 3,800 dolls/year

Step 6. Margin % Margin = Selling Price to Retailer - Unit Cost (on price) Selling Price to Retailer

Example: = $23- $13.18 $23 %Margin = 43%

Step 7. Retailer Margin % Margin = Selling Price to Consumer - Unit Cost (Reseller) (on price) Selling Price to Consumer

Example: $30- $23 = 23% A 23% margin is too narrow for $30 Peruvian retailers (who like to have a 40%

margin). Hasbro should be wary of launching Mr. Potato Head in Peru.

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What is a Brand?

Marketing analysis is primarily concerned with identifying a market, understanding it, and developing a product to fill a need in the market. (There are of course, other logistical details, such as understanding what is required to make the product profitable.)

But a product is just a physical object or service. A brand, on the other hand, is a product that has consistent emotional and function benefits attached to it. Products are interchangeable—a brand builds value. Brands engage the consumer, inspire an emotional reaction, and are consistent in their appearance. On a strategic level, brands can be thought of as a relationship between a company and a customer. On a tactical level, a brand is a consistent message that meets the customer at as many touch points as possible.

You can think of a brand as a “promise” to a consumer. It delivers a consistent tangible and emotional benefit—time and time again. Because of the strong focus on quality control at McDonald’s, you can pull off the road and stop into a McDonald’s virtually anywhere and expect the food and ambience to be consistent. That’s what makes it a strong brand.

What attributes create brands?

Consistent strategy

Products that are constantly changing their strategies and market positions will never hold a consistent place in the consumer’s mind. Owning a piece of the consumer’s mind makes a brand a brand. When you think of a coffee shop, you now think of Starbucks—that’s because Starbucks is a successful brand.

Consistent appearance

What do people think of visually when they think of your brand? Everyone knows Nike’s logo—an elegant, high-speed swoosh.

Positioning

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Connection with target audience

A brand must build an emotional connection with the consumers who use it. The consumer must feel that there are no substitutes in the marketplace. Consumers may choose Pepsi or Coke in a blind taste test—but that “preference” has little to do with the drink they actually buy in the supermarket.

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Top 13 Ways to Revitalize a Brand

Ways to revitalize a brand

Despite the fact that product categories are becoming more complex every day and marketing budgets are down, brand managers are constantly feeling pressure to increase sales, profits, and market share. This list is adapted from an article in Brandweekand provides excellent examples of how companies improved the marketing of brand name products.

1. Create new usage occasions. The makers of St. Joseph’s aspirin, which was always good for curing a headache, tout research that proves that taking two 81mg. aspirin can save your life during a heart attack.

2. Find customers outside your existing target groups. Coke Blak was officially announced. It will not be marketed as a coffee cola, but rather a premium “unique mind refreshment” targeting adults over 35.

3. Discover a new way of using the product. Paxil, Pfizer’s popular anti-depressant, is also approved and marketed as a treatment for Social Anxiety Disorder

4. Position your product as the one used by professionals and experts. Tiger Woods and Nike, Lance Armstrong and Bristol-Myers Squibb (manufactures drug Armstrong took during cancer treatment and to which he attributes his remission)

5. Tell a compelling story about your product’s origins. Dyson vacuum cleaners

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of the show (L&O: Criminal Intent; L&O: SVU, etc.); “Our House” song for Maxwell House coffee

7. Develop a new delivery vehicle or packaging convenience.

Lysol disposable cleansing wipes for kitchen, bath, etc. Photos can be delivered via CD, online or physical prints

8. Create a character to personify your product, ingredient or attribute or use celebrity spokespeople. Catherine Zeta-Jones for T-Mobile cellphones; Gekko for Geico insurance; David Spade for CapitalOne credit card

9. Use media vehicles in a new way. Digital promotions involving four billion codes on caps and packages of Coke products (Brandweek, 12/12/2006) BMW’s series of short films showcased on its website

10. Look for effective tie-ins/partnerships. Apple iPod and U2 Master Lock and the Super Bowl

11. Promote your product as benign addiction. Wendy’s Monterey Ranch Chicken sandwich points out that while some people have a sweet tooth, many now have a ‘ranch tooth’

12. Become the reason for family and friends’ togetherness.

Cingular cellphone’s Family Share plan; Folger’s annual holiday commercial depicting the favorite son surprising his family for the holidays

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The Basics of Advertising

Understanding marketing strategy and brand-building is the “thinking” behind a complete brand campaign. The second part is the “doing,” or the advertising. Having a great marketing strategy is useless without buliding a successful brand and maintaining brand image with consumers.

Here we give you a visual primer on the basics of advertising.

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Goal Examples

What Advertising Can Do

Induce trial

If you have a new brand and want people to try it, advertising is a great way to gain awareness of the product.

Olay Regenerist Face Cream, Adobe Online (this is a service that lets you create .pdfs online—gives you a free trial of five free .pdfs), iTunes (free download for iPod)

Intensify usage

If you have a product/brand that has lost share/marketing momentum, advertising is a great way to “reintroduce” people to the brand and increase usage patterns.

Dairy (including milk—dairy is getting a big push in every category because of its weight loss properties), The Gap, Campbell’s Soup

Sustain preference

If you already have a strong brand but want to maintain high awareness and usage rates, advertising is a great way to “remind” people of why they love your brand and to build their brand loyalty.

eBay, Visa, Coke & Pepsi

Confirm imagery

If you manage a brand that has a very distinctive image (expensive, exclusive or trendy and fashionable), advertising is a great way to cement consumer perception of the brand.

Rolex, Chanel No. 5 (consistently new advertising for a very old brand), Target

Change habits

Your product may force people to reconsider their current behavior. Advertising can make changing a habit “acceptable” because the consumer learns how to change these behaviors through the advertising.

DVR (digital video recorders—changing TV from ‘appointment’ TV to ‘on demand’), GoGurt, iPod

Build product line acceptance

Your brand may actually be composed of several individual products. Some advertisers promote an entire line of products. When advertising uses this approach, they are often hoping that if you currently use one product and are happy with it, then you will be more likely to buy other products within the line. This phenomenon is often called the “halo effect.”

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Goal Examples

Break the ice for salespeople

If the product or service you are marketing is very “sales intensive,” then advertising is a good way to help sell the service benefits of the product. Advertising the benefits of a product and making them well known makes selling that product much easier— as consumers are “pre-sold.”

Avon, Intel, Cingular Wireless

Build ambience

If your product is striving to own a certain consumer emotion, advertising is a great way to “hammer” that emotion home through creatives uses of music, touching vignettes, etc.

Disney, Chuck E. Cheese, Hallmark

Prove performance (via “torture tests”)

If you say that your product is the best in its category, then you better prove it (sometimes in a test vs. the competition). A classic example of this method is the Samsonite luggage campaign, in which a gorilla throws the luggage all over its cage and fails to damage it or its contents.

Glad Flex Trashbags, Masterlock, Verizon Wireless

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Evaluating an Ad

As you prepare for a marketing career, evaluate advertisements. Here are some questions that you should ask yourself every time you flip on the TV, leaf through a magazine, or tune into the radio.

• What is the objective or goal of this piece of communication? • Who is the consumer target? Is there more than one target? (i.e.

many foods products target both kids and their moms)

• What is the consumer insight or accepted consumer belief that led to the need for this ad.

• What is the message being conveyed? What does the brand promise and what support do they have to confirm that promise? For example, Tylenol might promise effective headache relief BECAUSE they have more pain reliever than any other over the counter medicine.

• How is the message communicated? What creative devices does the ad use (music, special effects)? What is the tone of the ad?

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Simple • Clear • Specific • Single-minded

Memorable

• Breaks through the clutter • Engaging, involving • Strong brand registration

Persuasive • Relevant • Meaningful

• Establishes distinctive point of difference • Convincing

• Fits with overall business strategy

INCREASED SALES!

Overly complex • Confusing • Ambiguous

• Trying to accomplish ten different things

Not Memorable

• Doesn’t grab your attention • Doesn’t keep your attention

• Poor brand linkage—Confusion about what brand is being advertised

Not Persuasive

• Not consumer-relevant (no one thinks like that!)

• Not targeted (to new country, ethnic group) • Doesn’t differentiate product from other

competitors

• Inconsistent with consumer perceptions of brand

NO/NEGATIVE IMPACT ON SALES!

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