Marketing course 101 Course Definitions

Definitions Chapter 1 Communicating: In marketing, a broad term meaning describing the offering and its value to potential customers, as well as learning from customers. Creating: In marketing, a term that involves collaboration with suppliers and customers in order to generate offerings of value to customers. Delivering: In marketing, as in delivering value, a broad term that means getting the product to the consumer and making sure that the user gets the most out of the product and service. Exchanging: The act of transacting value between a buyer and a seller. Marketing: The activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. Marketing plan: The strategy for implementing the components of marketing: creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging value. Offering: The entire bundle of a tangible good, intangible service, and price that makes up what a company offers to customers. Personal value equation: The net of the benefits received less the price paid and the hassle or effort expended in acquiring the product. Social marketing: The application of marketing principles and activities to achieve social change. Supply chain: The organizations and functions that mine, make, assemble, or deliver materials or products from manufacturers to consumers, as well as the network that help deliver value. Value: Total sum of benefits received that meet a buyer’s needs. See personal value equation.

Chapter 2 Divest: When a firm drops or sells a product or business. Joint venture: An entity that is created when two parties agree to share their profits, losses, and control with one another in an economic activity they jointly undertake. License: Sell the right to use some aspect of the production process, trademark, or patent to individuals in foreign markets. Market development strategy: Selling existing products or services to new customers. Foreign markets often present opportunities for organizations to expand. Exporting, licensing, franchising, joint ventures, and direct investment are methods that companies use to enter international markets. Market penetration strategy: Selling more of existing products and services to existing customers.

Mission statement: Defines the purpose of the organization and answers the question of how a company defines its business. Mystery shoppers: People who act like customers and visit competitors to learn about their customer service and their products. Objectives: What organizations want to accomplish (the end results) in a given time frame. Product development strategy: Creating new products or services for existing markets. Situation analysis: An assessment of an organization’s internal and external environments. Strategic planning process: A process that helps an organization allocate its resources under different conditions to accomplish its objectives, deliver value, and be competitive in a marketdriven economy. SWOT analysis: An analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing an organization. Strengths and weaknesses are internal to the organization and controllable, whereas opportunities and threats are external to the organization and largely uncontrollable. Tactics: Specific actions taken to execute strategies. Target market: The group of customers toward which an organization directs its marketing efforts. Value proposition: A statement that summarizes the key benefits or value for target customers. It explains why customers should buy a product, why stakeholders should donate, or why prospective employers may want to hire someone for their organization.

Chapter 3 Attitudes: “Mental positions” or emotional feelings people have about products, services, companies, ideas, issues, or institutions. Atmospherics: The physical aspects of the selling environment retailers try to control. Consumer behavior: The study of when, where, and how people buy things and then dispose of them. Cognitive age: The age a buyer perceives himself/herself to be. Extended problem solving: Purchasing decisions in which a consumer gathers a significant amount of information before making a decision. High-involvement decisions: Products that carry a high price tag or high level of risk to the individual or group making the decision. Ideal self: How a person would like to view himself/herself. Impulse buying: Purchases that occurs with no planning or forethought. Low-involvement decisions: Products that carry a low risk of failure and/or have a low price tag for a specific individual or group making the decision. Opinion leaders: People with expertise in certain areas. Consumers respect these people and often ask their opinions before they buy goods and services. Perception: How people interpret the world around them.

Personality: An individual’s disposition as other people see it. Planned obsolescence: A deliberate effort by companies to make their products obsolete, or unusable, after a period of time. Psychographics: Measuring the attitudes, values, lifestyles, and opinions of consumers using demographics. Self-concept: How a person sees himself/herself. Shock advertising: Advertising designed to startle people so as to get their attention. Subliminal advertising: Advertising that is not apparent to consumers but is thought to be perceived subconsciously by them.

Chapter 4 Business-to-government (B2G) markets: Markets in which local, state, and federal governments buy products. Buying centers: Groups of people within organizations who make purchasing decisions. Decider: The person who makes the final purchasing decision. Gatekeepers: People who decide if and when a salesperson gets access to members of the buying center. Influencers: People who may or may not use the product but actively participate in the purchasing process in order to secure a decision they consider favorable. Institutional markets: Nonprofits organizations such as the American Red Cross, churches, hospitals, charitable organizations, private colleges and civic clubs. Modified rebuy: When a company wants to buy the same type of product it has in the past but make some modifications to it. New buy: When a firm purchases a product for the first time. Producers: Companies that purchase goods and services that they transform into other products. Resellers: Companies that sell goods and services produced by other firms without materially changing them. Users: The people and groups within the organization that actual use the product.

Chapter 5 Behavioral Segmentation: Dividing people and organization into groups according to how they behave with or towards products. Concentrated Marketing: Targeting a very select group of customers. Demographic Segmentation: Segmenting buyers by personal characteristics such as their ages, incomes, ethnicity, and family sizes. Geographic Segmentation: Segmenting buyers by where they are located.

Market Segmentation: The process of breaking down all consumers into groups of potential buyers with similar characteristics. Mass Marketing: Selling the same product to all consumers. Niche Marketing: Targeting an extremely select group of consumers. One-to-one Marketing: Forming close, personal relationships with customers and giving them exactly what they want. Positioning: How consumers view a product relative to the competition. Psychographic Segmentation: Segmenting people by their activities, interests, opinion, attitudes, values, and lifestyles. Tagline: A catchphrase designed to sum up the essence of a product. Targeted Marketing: Choosing select groups of people to sell to.

Chapter 6 Benefit: The degree to which a feature satisfies a buyer’s need or desire. Brand: A name, picture or design, symbol, or combination of those items used by a seller to differentiate its offerings from competitors’. Brand mark: A symbol or logo used to identify a brand. Brand name: The spoken part of an identity used to describe of a brand. Convenience offering: Low-priced, frequently purchased products and services that require little shopping effort. Feature: Characteristic of an offering. Impulse offering: An offering that is purchased on impulse, without prior planning. Product: A tangible good that can be bought, sold, and owned. Product mix: The entire assortment of products that a firm offers. Service: an intangible component of an offering. Service-dominant: An approach to offerings that integrates the physical product, attendant services, and price into the total offering. Shopping offering: An offering for which the consumer will make an effort to compare various firms’ offerings and select a brand. Specialty offering: An offering that is highly differentiated from other offerings designed to satisfy a similar need or want. Total cost of ownership (TCO): The total amount of time and money spent to acquire, use, and dispose of an offering. Unsought offering: Offerings consumers do not typically shop for until they need them; examples include funeral and towing services.

Chapter 7 Alpha testing: The testing of a product in a laboratory setting. Beta testing: The testing of a product by real customer in the customer’s location. Concept testing: Presenting an idea for an offering (including possible marketing communication ideas) to consumers for their reaction early in the offering development process. Decline stage: The stage of the life cycle where sales drop and companies must decide whether to keep, modify, or drop a product. Growth stage: The stage of the life cycle where sales increase and more competitors enter the market. Introduction stage: The first stage of the product life cycle after a product is launched. Market test: The test of the launch of a product’s complete marketing plan to ensure that it reaches buyers, gets positive reactions, and generates sales of the product. Maturity stage: The stage of the product life cycle where sales begin to level off and competitors have saturated the market. Penetration pricing strategy: A low initial price that companies use when introducing a new product. A low price helps attract many customers. Product lifecycle (PLC): The stages (introduction, growth, maturity, decline) that a product may go through over time. Rolling launch: Introducing a new offering across markets one by one in order to work out any challenges or problems related to marketing and supporting the offering.

Chapter 8 Convenience stores: Miniature supermarkets that stock a limited assortment of products. Many of them sell gasoline and are open 24 hours a day. Department stores: Stores that carry a wide variety of household and personal types of merchandise such as clothing and jewelry. Direct channel: A marketing channel that consists of a producer and consumer. Direct marketing: Developing and sending promotional materials such as catalogs, letters, leaflets, e-mails, and online ads straight to consumers urging them to contact your firm directly to buy products. Distributors: Businesses that purchase large quantities of products, can store products, can sell products, can deliver desired quantities of products and can offer services. Distributors generally take title to products and employ a sales force to actively market their products. Indirect channel: A marketing that consists of a producer, a consumer, and one or more intermediaries. Intermediaries: Third parties that facilitate the supply and sale of products from manufacturers to users.

Marketing channel: The group of organizations involved in selling and promoting goods from the time they are produced until they reach end users. Supply chain: All of the organizations that participate in the production, promotion, and delivery of a product or service from the producer to the end consumer. Wholesalers: Businesses that purchase products in large quantities, can store the products, and can break the pallets down into cases or units, and can deliver the desired quantity of a product to distributors, retailers, and/or consumers.

Chapter 9 Distribution center: A warehouse or storage facility where the emphasis is on processing and moving goods on to wholesalers, retailers, or consumers rather than on storage. Inventory control: The process of ensuring your firm has an adequate amount of products and a wide enough assortment of them meet your customers’ needs. Shrinkage: A term used to describe a reduction or loss in inventory due to shoplifting, employee theft, paperwork errors, and supplier fraud. Value chain: A term that is sometimes used interchangeably with the term supply chain. The idea behind the value chain is that your supply chain partners should do more for you than perform just basic functions.

Chapter 10 Case study: A study that looks at how another company, or companies, solved a problem being researched. Field experiment: A marketing research experiment conducted in a natural setting such as a store versus a simulated setting in a laboratory or on a computer. Focus group: A group of potential buyers brought together to discuss a marketing research topic with one another. Market intelligence: Information gathered on a regular, ongoing basis to enable a firm’s decision makers stay in touch with what is happening in the marketplace. Market research: The process of a researching a specific market to determine its size and trends. Marketing research: The process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting marketing information that can be used for to improve a company’s bottom line. Mystery shopper: A person who is paid to shop at a firm’s establishment or one of its competitors’ to observe the level of service, cleanliness of the facility, and so forth, and report his or her findings to the firm. Test market: The place where an experiment is conducted or the demographic group of people an experiment is administered to.

Chapter 13 Account manager: A salesperson responsible for ongoing business with a customer who uses a product. Satisfying long-term customers and persuading them to reorder products are important activities for account managers. Missionary salesperson: A salesperson who calls on people who make decisions about products but do not actually buy them. Prospector: A salesperson whose primary responsibility is prospecting, or finding potential customers; the salesperson might be responsible for closing the sales or simply turning the prospects over to someone else to close. Trade salesperson: Someone who calls on retailers and provides them assistance with merchandising and selling products to consumers.