Marketing

Marketing is understanding that marketing operates on 2 different levels.
===Strategic attempts to determine how an organization competes against its competition in a market place. In particular, it aims at generating a competitive advantage relative to its competition. Trout says that war between competitors' and 'the conflict between companies' what he is really doing is defining marketing at the business level.
Top management needs to determine what type of business to run and where the business wants to be in 15 - 20 years time.
Step 2: To enable management to make well informed decisions, information needs to be gathered from the environment. The environment is divided into three main parts namely the micro environment (This represents the business itself and is also known as the internal environment), the market environment (this the business) and the macro environment (this represents political (policies & licenseformat so that the managers can use it SWOT grid. A SWOT grid is a summary of the findings of the situation analysis in Strengths, Weaknesses (both from the internal environment) and Opportunites and Threats (both from the external environment).
Step 3: Decision making. Once the marketing managers are in possession of suitable information, they embark on a process of decision making. The combined result of the decisions forms the marketing strategy. get out of the market (divest). After this decision has been made, the marketing manager must decide what competitive advantages a business possesses. A decision on segmentation follows, and from these segments a business can decide which and how many segments to select as target markets. Following the selection of target markets, a positioning sub strategy should be created for each and every target market selected to serve. Positioning consists of two steps. First, the positioning instruments (marketing mix variables) are employed to create in the mind of a consumer a favorable picture of the business when compared to rivals. Secondly, the position should be communicated to the targeted consumers by using one of the positioning Step 4: Implementation. Once all the decisions are made it is said that the strategy is created. It can be the best strategy ever, but if it stays on paper nothing will happen. Implementation is a two part processBudget Many influences exert pressure on the environment. Some of these include your own and your competitors' business decisions and the , missions and objectives and the whole strategic process repeats itself. This includes the determination of the marketing mix, advertising execution etc..