best practices

Examples of best practices in the following topics:

• Marketing as an Entrepreneurial Force

  • The American Heritage Dictionary defines this practice as "intrapreneurship."
  • The practice of intrapreneurship represents corporate management styles that integrate risk taking and innovative approaches, as well as reward and motivational techniques traditionally aligned with entrepreneurship.
  • Marketing employees, in particular, must constantly be versed in the latest online communications and industry best practices to competitively position brands in domestic and international markets.
  • Marketing best practices can be used to encourage innovation within organizations.

• Methods for Evaluating Marketing Performance

  • Independent organizations such as the Advertising Research Foundation evaluate the validity of commonly used measurement systems to produce standards and best practices for evaluating marketing and advertising data.

• Influence on the Entire Supply Chain

  • In response to consumer and market pressures, organizations may enact operational improvements ranging from reducing water use, energy use, and waste, to adopting best practices in governance and employee engagement.
  • Negative public response over the use of pesticides or the unfair treatment of factory workers have often led to brands selling organically grown foods, adopting anti-sweatshop labor practices, and promoting locally produced goods that support independent and small businesses.
  • Failing to identify efficiencies and develop best practices can increase costs, reduce service levels, and result in an overall loss of control.

• Training Programs

  • Training and coaching involve sharing ones knowledge on selling products as well as motivating salespeople to practice what you tell them with customers on the sales floor.
  • One of the best ways to get people to practice is to provide encouragement and acceptance for achievement and allow them to develop their strengths.
  • Employees should take turns pretending to be salespeople and customers to practice various sales tactics.

• Monitoring Competition

  • As a fundamental practice, marketing companies must thoroughly understand their competitors' strengths and weaknesses.
  • It means basing intelligent marketing decisions on facts about how competitors operate, as well as determining how best to respond.
  • Since practically no marketer operates as a monopoly, most of the strategy issues considered by a marketer relate to competition.
  • Competitive intelligence is an ethical and legal business practice, as opposed to industrial espionage which is illegal.

• The Importance of Market Segmentation

  • Segmentation splits buyers into groups with similar needs and wants to best utilize a firm's finite resources through buyer based marketing.
  • While the market is initially reduced to its smallest homogeneous components (perhaps a single individual), business in practice requires the marketer to find common dimensions that will allow him to view these individuals as larger, profitable segments.

• Illegal Price Advertising

  • In another example, Fretter Appliance stores claimed "I'll give you five pounds of coffee if I can't beat your best deal. " While initially they gave away that quantity, they later redefined them as "Fretter pounds," which, unsurprisingly, were much lighter than standard pounds.
  • "Better" means one item is superior to another in some way, while "best" means it is superior to all others in some way.
  • In an inconsistent comparison, an item is compared with many others, but only compared with each on the attributes where it wins, leaving the false impression that it is the best of all products, in all ways.
  • Advertising is regulated by the authority of the Federal Trade Commission to prohibit "unfair and deceptive acts or practices in commerce. " What is illegal is the potential to deceive, which is interpreted to occur when consumers see the advertising to be stating to them, explicitly or implicitly, a claim that they may not realize is false and material.

• Service Marketing Management and Metrics

  • Marketing management is a business discipline which is focused on the practical application of marketing techniques and the management of a firm's marketing resources and activities.
  • After the firm's strategic objectives have been identified, the target market selected, and the desired positioning for the company, product, service or brand has been determined, marketing managers focus on how to best implement the chosen strategy.

• Perceptual Mapping

  • They felt that Plymouth cars were the most practical and conservative.
  • This is best done by placing both the ideal points and the competing products on the same map.

• The Relationship Between Product and Promotion

  • In addition to pinpointing which price point and distribution channels would best serve those country markets, global marketers must decide how to introduce their products.
  • While global promotion enables global brands to engage in uniform marketing practices and promote a consistent brand and image, marketers also face the challenge of responding to differences in consumer response to marketing mix elements.