Taking the Mystery Out of Marketing
Marketing describes everything your business does as it readies its goods and services for the marketplace. In this manual, you are developing marketing research plans and actual strategic plans for marketing as part of your business plan.
But marketing plans also can be larger, more specific plans (or maps) of their own. That doesn’t mean they are difficult to understand. Rather, drawing up a marketing plan to accompany your business plan should take some of the mystery out of what happens as you progress in your business.
Agricultural groups need to become successful marketers if their value added agricultural businesses are going to be successful. If a group does not feel it has the marketing expertise necessary, it should consider aligning itself with those who do through marketing partnerships with individuals and groups.
People generally buy from a business because that business gives them what they want in the most convenient and cost-effective way. They also may buy from a business out of loyalties that have built up over a span of time – they’ve formed an actual or a mental relationship. Such businesses have successfully used marketing tools and planning. They have spotted new trends and created products and services that customers want. They put products on the market with the right message, in the right place, at the right time. They have turned well-researched market opportunities into businesses.
The market research you carry out, as discussed in earlier, allows you to make informed, intelligent marketing decisions. Your research should center on your product, customer, competition and production potential.
Put in simple terms, marketing is the means of exchanging goods and bringing them, literally, to the marketplace. Before the 1950s, comparatively little importance was placed on the actual selling of goods. It was thought that high quality goods would sell themselves. In the mid 1950s, with falling consumer demand and supply levels bouncing back from World War II shortages, businesses found they needed to update their approaches to both product and sales.
A “market” is composed of actual or potential buyers of a product or service and the sellers who offer goods to meet buyers’ needs. Businesses can target mass markets composed of many people with broadly similar needs. Or, they can target niche markets, composed of fewer customers with specific, very similar needs.
Primarily, this manual focuses on development of niche markets. To become involved in a mass market would require displacing an already firmly established company. That would take extremely deep pockets. Established companies have become such because of years of investment and buying, merging and taking over competitors. Opportunities do seem to exist and actually to be growing for ag based groups to align themselves with established companies and to provide a market segmentation for them, or be suppliers of the products through a supply network.
Economic conditions, the quantity and quality of competitors, consumer trends, government regulations, trade barriers and agreements, and cultural and demographic shifts impact markets. How well you understand your customer and your market conditions will determine how effectively you are able to navigate your business around obstacles and take advantage of new opportunities.
What ever happened to the business that believed the world needed a better mousetrap simply because it could build one? The company pumped time, money and energy into creating a great mousetrap. In the end, its efforts failed. Customers didn’t buy the better mousetrap. Why? Because the old style also caught mice, and it cost a lot less. In short, the world really didn’t need a better mousetrap! Businesses that set their goals without first looking to their customers’ needs often end up paying a price.
Along the same lines, businesses that focus solely on improving productivity and designing new products around new technology suffer from a product orientation. They sell what they produce rather that make what they can sell to satisfy a customer need. Similar results happen when businesses focus on internal operations at the expense of getting out and knowing their customers.
Most successful businesses have a strong customer orientation and design most of their marketing strategies around the needs of their customers. These activities include carefully researching and segmenting individual customer markets.
Successful marketing is not a single activity you do. It is a collection of strategies and tactics at varied levels and targeting varied end-results.