10. Levels of marketing systems

You can study marketing on very different ways.

9. Retail

Retailing is sector where many companies are involved in strong competition. Retailing is also the last link in the distribution chain. They are the ones responsible for delivering final products. It contains all the activities that are direct linked with the sale of the product or services. Retailers are also the ones that influence the buyer because they decide for example the store location, assortment and the qualities of its employees.  They might even influences the image buyers have of the manufactures.       

Types of stores

Specialist

The assortments of specialist are very small, but with depth (meaning brands, model s etc). Costumers can often get advice from experts. They often can ask high prices for their product thanks to the extended services, store atmosphere and other added value they offer. 

Convenience store

The assortments   consist of convenience goods that provides in life necessity. Popular convenience stores are traffic stores, for example gas station or other kinds of small store in the neighborhood of train station and metro. The goods provided by convenience stores constitute a supplement to the weekly food shopping of consumers.

Supermarket

Supermarket have a very a broad and deep range of food goods. The price at this type of store has to be reasonable or the consumers. High price might cause the consumers to think that the supermarket is high and influence them to shop at other supermarket. Three success factors for supermarkets are for example: easy accessibility, reasonable and wide prices and deep assortment of food.

Self-Department Store

It is also known as hypermarket. This is a mixture of warehouse and supermarket. They carry fairly wide and deep assortment, which consist mostly of two third of durable consumer goods and other non-food products and services.  

Warehouse

These are big stores with thousands of consumers and are located in the city centre. Most of the time consumers know that the stores are attractive. The have a reasonable and deep assortment. They are presented by the atmospheric department with different cash desk.

 

Discounter

Discounter stores have a broad with low priced products. The quality of the services provide in these stores are very low. The stores are often basically furnished, radiate little atmosphere and often lie outside the city centre.

8. Marketing Communication

Marketing communication is the combination of all the resources a firm uses to build relationships with its target audience, by informing or to influencing them to get a positive imageof the company, accepting their ideas or buying its products or services.   

Marketing Communications Mix

The specific mix of advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing a company uses to pursue its advertising and marketing objectives is called Marketing Communications Mix. The mix of promotional tools depends a lot on a company’s size, nature and goals.

  

 

1. Advertising - Any paid form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services.

2. Personal selling - Personal presentation by the firm’s sales force for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships.

3. Sales promotion - Short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service.

4. Public relations - Building good relationships with the company’s various publics by obtaining favorable publicity, building up a good business image and handling unfavorable rumors, stories, and events.

5. Direct marketing - Direct communications with carefully targeted individual consumers to obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships.

7. Type of Markets

Monopolistic Market

Monopolistic Market consists of one provider of a particular product. This type of market only exists when an organization has the right to be the seller and owns a patent. This guarantees an organization the ability to an exclusively right to manufacture or sale of a product. Because there is no direct competition an organization can sometimes determine their own price.  

Oligopoly

This market is a market form in which a market is dominated by a few large suppliers. The degree of market concentration is very high. Firms in this type of market produce branded products and there are also barriers to entry. An other important characteristic of this type of market  is the fact that firms must take into account how other firms might react in the market when making pricing and investment decisions.

Monopolist competition

This is an extremely common market form. At this type of market there are a lot of providers, each producing similar, but slightly differentiated products. This type of market competition is also known as heterogeneous polypoly. The differences of the product are based on quality, composition, design, packaging, advertising and distribution method. It is easier for the competition to enter this type of market.    

Fully competition

6. Consumer behaviour models

The study of consumer behaviour focuses on how individuals make decisions to spend their available resources. The field of consumer behaviour covers a lot of ground. 

The consumer behaviour models attempt to describe, explain and/ or predict consumer decisions and purchasing process before, during or after the sale of a product. Reviewing these models has not always been possible. There are explicit and implicit behavioural models. Explicit behavioural models attempt to gain insight into the decision making process and factors that might affect safety. Implicit behavioural models seek connections between stimulants and responses. Examples of these models are:

The Nicosia model (1976)

This model focuses on the relationship between the firm and its potential consumers. The firm communicates with consumers through its marketing messages for example advertising. And the consumers react to these messages by purchasing response. If you look at the model you will see that the firm tries to influence the consumer and the consumer influences the firm by his decision.

The Howard and Seth model

There are three levels of decision making in this model. The first level describes the problem solving. At this stage the consumer does not have any information, knowledge or preferences for any product.  During this situation, the consumer searches for information about all the different brands in the market before purchasing.  The second level is problem solving. This happens to consumers who do not have enough knowledge about the market about what they want to purchase. The consumer will search more information in order to arrive at a brand preference. The third level is regular response behaviour. At this level, the consumer knows the different brands very well. He can differentiate between the different characteristics of each product. He also decides to purchase a certain product.

      

                                     

  

5.3 The Engel-Blackwell-Miniard model

This model states that all actions of consumers result of internal and external variables. The external variables are social influences (e.g. culture, reference groups and family) and situational influences. Internal variables are individual characteristics (e.g. motives, values, lifestyle and personality). This model consists also of four stages:

1. Decision-process stages. This focuses on five basic decision-process stages: Problem recognition, search for alternatives, alternate evaluation purchase, and outcomes.

2. Information input. The consumer gets information from marketing and non-marketing sources.

3. Information processing.  It consists of the consumer’s exposure, attention, perception and acceptance.

4. Variables influencing the decision process. It consists of individual and environmental influences that affect all five stages of the decision process.

5. Consumer behaviour

Costumer behaviour is the thoughts and actions of individuals who are directly related to the assessment, obtainment, use and disposal of goods and services. It is about individual consumers (also known as “finale consumer”) who make a purchase individual or family consumption. The consumption process knows four phase:

1. Information and communication behaviour.

2. Buying behavior.

3. Consumption behavior.

4. Disposal behavior.

Costumer behaviour is a part of the human overall human behavior studied from differentfields. Every part of these fields highlights consumer behavior for example:

• The psychology of how consumers think, feels, reason, and select between different alternatives.
• The psychology of how the consumer is influenced by his or her environment.
• The behavior of consumers of producing, exchanging and consuming goods and services, including the use of scarce resources to satisfy needs.
• Consumers in relation to its cultural environment.
• Economics is the study of the production, trading and consuming goods and services, including the uses of scarce resources to satisfy needs. 

Psychological factors play a very important roll in the customer behaviour. The most relevant factors or customer behaviour are:  
 

Motivation.  It comes from an unconscious need or a feeling of deficiency that and leads to activity that satisfies that need.
Perception. Psychologists distinguish between sensation and perception .
Learning. It is relatively permanent behaviour, which is based on experience. Sometimes a learning effect coincidental (incidental learning).

Attitude. It is partly learned and the other part on personality based on a stable way of response to an object or object class.

Personality and lifestyle. This is a set of consistent responses of an individual relative to its environment. Meaning a consistent behaviour pattern even if the individual changes of environment.
Trust. The confidence of consumers in the development of the economy and whether or not it is a good timeto buy expensive goods plays also an important role.