市场营销管理-外文翻译

外文翻译

原文

Title:Marketing management

Material Source: Marketing Management Author: Philip Kotler In fact, we can distinguish three stages through which marketing practice might pass:

1. Entrepreneurial marketing: Most companies are started by individuals who visualize an opportunity and knock on every door to gain attention. Jim Koch, founder of Boston Beer Company, whose Samuel Adams beer has become a top-selling “craft” beer, started out in 1984 carrying bottles of Samuel Adams from bar to bar to persuade bartenders to carry it. For 10 years, he sold his beer through direct selling and grassroots public relations. Today his business pulls in nearly$200 million, making it the leader in the U.S. craft beer market.2

2. Formulated marketing: As small companies achieve success, they inevitably move toward more formulated marketing. Boston Beer recently began a$15 million television advertising campaign. The company now employs more that 175 salespeople and has a marketing department that carries on market research, adopting some of the tools used in professionally run marketing companies.

3. Coordinated marketing: Many large companies get stuck in formulated marketing, poring over the latest ratings, scanning research reports, trying to fine-tune dealer relations and advertising messages. These companies lack the creativity and passion of the guerrilla marketers in the entrepreneurial stage. Their brand and product managers need to start living with their customers and visualizing new ways to add value to their customers’ lives.

The bottom line is that effective marketing can take many forms. Although it is easier to study the formulated side (which will occupy most of our attention in this book), we will also see how creativity and passion can be used by today and tomorrow’s marketing managers.

Marketers and Prospects

A marketer is someone who is seeking a response (attention, a purchase, a vote, a donation) from another party, called the prospect. If two parties are seeking to sell

something to each other, both are marketers.

Needs, Wants, and Demands

The successful marketer will try to understand the target market’s needs, wants, and demands. Needs describes basic human requirements such as food, air, water, clothing, and shelter. People also have strong needs for recreation, education, and entertainment. These needs become wants when they are directed to specific objects that might satisfy the need. An American needs food but wants a hamburger, French fries, and a soft drink. A person in Mauritius needs food but wants a mango, rice, lentils, and beans. Clearly, wants are shaped by one’s society.

Demands are wants for specific products backed by an ability to pay. Many people want a Mercedes; only a few are able and willing to buy one. Companies must measure not only how many people want their product, but also how many would actually be willing and able to buy it.

However, marketers do not create needs: Needs that preexists marketers. Marketers, along with other societal influences, influence wants. Marketers might promote the idea that a Mercedes would satisfy a person’s need for social status. They do not, how-ever, create the need for social status.

Product or Offering

People satisfy their needs and wants with products. A product is any offering that we can satisfy a need or want, such as one of the 10 basic offerings of goods,services,experi-ences,events,persons,places,properties,organizations,informati on,and ideas.

A brand is an offering from a known source. A brand name such as McDonald’s carries many associations in the minds of people: hamburgers, fun, children, fast food, golden arches. These associations make up the brand image. All companies strive to build a strong, favorable brand image.

Value and Satisfaction

In terms of marketing, the product or offering will be successful if it delivers value and satisfaction to the target buyer. The buyer chooses between different offerings on the basis of which is perceived to deliver the most value. We define value as a ratio between what the customer gets and what he gives. The customer gets benefits and assumes costs, as shown in this equation.

A customer choosing between two value offerings, V1and V2, will examine the ratio V1/V2.She will favor V1 if the ratio is larger than one; she will favor V2 if the ratio is smaller than one; and she will be indifferent if the ratio equals one.

Exchange and Transactions

Exchange, the core of marketing, involves obtaining a desired product from someone by offering something in return. For exchange potential to exist, five conditions must be satisfied:

1. There are at least two parties.

2. Each party has something that might be of value to the other party.

3. Each party is capable of communication and delivery. Marketing Tasks 7

4. Each party is free to accept or reject the exchange offer.

5. Each party believes it is appropriate or desirable to deal with the other party.

Whether exchange actually takes place depends upon whether the two parties can agree on terms that will leave them both better off (or at least not worse off) than before. Exchange is a value-creating process because it normally leaves both parties better off.

Note that exchange is a process rather than an event. Two parties are engaged in exchange if they are negotiating—trying to arrive at mutually agreeable terms. When an agreement is reached, we say that a transaction takes place. A transaction involves at least two things of value, agreed-upon conditions, a time of agreement, and a place of agreement usually a legal system exists to support and enforce compliance among of transactors. However, transactions do not require money as one of the traded values. A barter transaction, for example, involves trading goods or services for other goods or services.

Note also that a transaction differs from a transfer. In a transfer, A gives a gift, a subsidy, or a charitable contribution to B but receives nothing tangible in return. Transfer behavior can also be understood through the concept of exchange. Typically, the transfer expects something in exchange for his or her gift—for example, gratitude or seeing changed behavior in the recipient. Professional fund-raisers provide benefits to donors, such as thank-you notes. Contemporary marketers have broadened the concept of marketing to include the study of transfer behavior as well as transaction behavior.

Marketing consists of actions undertaken to elicit desired responses from a tar-get audience. To effecting successful exchanges, marketers analyze what each party expects from the transaction. Suppose Caterpillar, the world’s largest manufacturer of earth-moving equipment, researches the benefits that a typical construction company wants when it buys such equipment. The items shown on the prospect want list in Figure 1-2 are not equally important and may vary from buyer

to buyer. One of Caterpillar’s marketing tasks is to discover the relative importance of these different wants to the buyer.

As the marketer, Caterpillar also has a want list. If there is a sufficient match or overlap in the want lists, a basis for a transaction exists. Caterpillar’s task is to form u-late an offer that motivates the construction company to buy Caterpillar equipment. The construction company might, in turn, make a counter offer. This process of negotiation leads to mutually acceptable terms or a decision not to transact.

Relationships and Networks

Transaction marketing is part of a larger idea called relationship marketing. Relationship marketing aims to build long-term mutually satisfying relations with key par-ties—customers, suppliers, distributors—in order to earn and retain their long-term preference and business.10 Effective marketers accomplish this by promising and delivering high-quality products and services at fair prices to the other parties over time. Relationship marketing builds strong economic, technical, and social ties among the parties. It cuts down on transaction costs and time. In the most successful cases, transactions move from being negotiated each time to being a matter of routine.

The ultimate outcome of relationship marketing is the building of a unique company asset called a marketing network. A marketing network consists of company and its supporting stake holder (customers, employees, suppliers, distributors)

Scientists, and others with whom it has built mutually profitable business relationships. Increasingly, competition is not between companies but rather between marketing networks, with the profits going to the company that has the better network.

Marketing Channels

To reach a target market, the marketer uses three kinds of marketing channels. Communication channels deliver messages to and receive messages from target buyers.

Thenewspapers,magazines,radio,television,mail,telephone,billboards,posters,fl iers,CDs,audiotapes,and the Internet. Beyond these, communications are conveyed by facial expressions and clothing, the look of retail stores, and many other media. Marketers are increasingly adding dialogue channels (e-mail and toll-free numbers) to counterbalance the more normal monologue channels (such as ads).

The marketer uses distribution channels to display or deliver the physical

product or service(s) to the buyer or user. There are physical distribution channels and service distribution channels, which include warehouses, transportation vehicles, and various trade channels such as distributors, wholesalers, and retailers. The marketer also uses selling channels to effect transactions with potential buyers. Selling channels include not only the distributors and retailers but also the banks and insurance companies that facilitate transactions. Marketers clearly face a design problem in choosing the best mix of communication, distribution, and selling channels for their offerings.

Supply Chain

Whereas marketing channels connect the marketer to the target buyers, the supply chain describes a longer channel stretching from raw materials to components to final products that are carried to final buyers. For example, for women’s purses starts with hides, operations, cutting operations, manufacturing, and the marketing channels that brings products to customers. This supply chain represents a value delivery system. Each company captures only a certain percentage of the total value generated by the supply chain. When a company acquires competitors or moves upstream or downstream, its aim is to capture a higher percentage of supply chain value.

Competition

Competition, a critical factor in marketing management, includes all of the actual and potential rival offerings and substitutes that a buyer might consider. Suppose an automobile company is planning to buy steel for its cars. The car manufacturer can buy from U.S. Steel or other U.S. or foreign integrated steel mills; can go to a small plant such Marketing Tasks 9 as Nucor to buy steel at a cost savings; can buy alu minum for certain parts of the car to lighten the car’s weight; or can buy some engineered plastics parts instead of steel. Clearly U.S. Steel would be thinking too narrowly of competition if it thought only of other integrated steel companies. In fact, U.S. Steel is more likely to be hurt in the long run by substitute products than by its immediate steel company rivals. U.S. Steel also must consider whether to make substitute materials or stick only to applications in which steel offers superior performance.

Consumer behavior

The field of consumer behavior studies how individuals, group, and organizations select, buy, use, and dispose of goods, services, ideas, or experiences to satisfy their needs and desires. The major factors influencing buying behavior: