Study guide: Marketing Strategy Fundamentals

📋 Course Outline

1. Marketing’s Historical Evolution
2. Marketing and Perceived Value
3. Innovation and Customer Orientation

📖 1. Marketing’s Historical Evolution

★ Must-know

• The production era (1870–1930) prioritized producing more at lower cost when demand exceeded supply.

• The selling era (1930–1950) emphasized selling accumulated product stocks as supply exceeded demand.

• From 1950, the marketing era focused on studying customer needs and creating products that meet their expectations.

📌 Transactional marketing (1950–1980) focuses on products, short-term orientation, and sales, while relational marketing (1980–2000) focuses on customers and long-term relationships.

Further detail

• Since 2000, marketing has entered an experiential phase in addition to its transactional and relational roles.

💡 Memory Hook

Production gives way to selling, then to customer-focused marketing.

📖 2. Marketing and Perceived Value

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Marketing: The process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return, as defined by Koster and Armstrong (2010).

★ Must-know

📌 Perceived value is the difference between the benefits customers perceive they receive and the costs they perceive they incur when acquiring a product.

Further detail

• In practice, marketing studies target customers’ needs, uses, desires, and wishes, creates product, service, and experience offerings, and disseminates those offerings for profit or not-for-profit purposes.

• Perceived benefits include: an offer’s characteristics, performance, quality, associated services, the brand and values associated with the product

• Perceived costs include:

  • the product price
  • effort required to acquire it
  • time required to acquire it
  • product-change costs
  • risks associated with its use

• Customer value may be:

  • functional or instrumental
  • social, relational or symbolic
  • emotional, experiential and hedonic

💡 Memory Hook

Benefits are what customers get; costs are what they give.

📖 3. Innovation and Customer Orientation

★ Must-know

• Technological innovation changes product-related physical characteristics, such as ingredients, materials, or packaging, whereas marketing innovation changes other elements that can increase customer satisfaction.

• Incremental innovation makes small changes to customer behavior, whereas radical innovation introduces a substantially new use, as illustrated by BlaBlaCar’s car-sharing use of existing cars.

• In a push logic, firms begin with their offering and seek to sell it, whereas in a pull logic they create customer value that attracts consumers.

Further detail

• In a pull logic, consumers may pay a higher price for a brand when they perceive its value as interesting and superior.

💡 Memory Hook

Push starts with the firm; pull starts with customer value.