Marketing Management is my 2nd course in MBA. I got ‘A’ grade for this subject. In fact, I didn’t get much from class room lecturing. But I learnt a lot from group project.

“If you’ve never practicing, you will never know.”

In group project, we need to create marketing plan. It starts from macro scale to understand the whole demands of the world or the country related to your product or service. Then you needs to zoom down bit by bit, to understand demography, geography and psychography of your consumers. You also needs to know your SWOT analysis in competing with competitors. If you thinks that you can gain the market share and differentiate your product from competitors, then you will start to develop famous STP in your marketing plan.

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning (STP) are the heart of marketing plan. It follows the fact that you cannot serve everyone with your limited capacity. Therefore, you must select the best part out of whole consumer demands by differentiate your product with marketing strategic plan and don’t forget to mention about your goals and objectives.

The heart of strategic planning is how to sit into your targeted consumer heart (listen to your customer) and let them repeat ordering for your product. 4P (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) and 4C (Consumer value, Cost, Convenience, Communication) with IMC (Integrated Marketing Communications, nowadays called as Omni-Channel strategy) play important role here. Once you have a good looking plan, the last part is to make sure that you generate profit within expected time span. Financial plan will be the last part of your marketing plan. If you can do and understand all the above, you will get A.

People love this subject because it allow you to bring out your imagination, there is no right or wrong as long as you cover all topics. Concept is very high level framework, you must elaborate how to win consumer mind. The class continue with less tension compare to other courses. Everybody get a good grade. Once you go deep dive, you will think that Western theory is so deep studying. They are serious and analyze in every possible conditions that may impact to product demand and supply. Many of MBA students impress about it  and would like to know more.

In the old day, I found that it is very difficult to apply IT in marketing world since marketing play with customer emotion much more than logical thinking. Thanks to the digital world, all consumers is moving into digital world and interact with their product via mobile and social media as their main channel. We can say that Digital is the front end of technology toward consumer and IT is the back end engine to present Digital solution.

Once consumer click and browse over internet, IT can capture all the behavior data from their click and moving through the whole webpages. It helps company to understand consumer behavior and personalize into segmentation which leading to personalization marketing. In order to do that, company needs to have big data to keep million customers click, moving along web pages and using data analytic tool to find out consumer insight. Then targeting them with individual digital marketing campaign on all possible channels for particular consumer.