Marketing Strategy for Creative and Cultural Industries

Bonita M. Kolb

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317429791
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Business General

Successful marketing strategiesare a vital aspect of any business. This textbook provides students and potential managers in the creative industries with a solid grounding in how to maximize the impact of their marketing efforts across a range of business types in the creative and cultural industries.

With a range of learning exercises and real-life examples, this text shows how to create and execute successful marketing plans for creative businesses and is useful for marketing students and practitioners.

1
Planning marketing strategically

The chapter will answer the following questions

• Why is strategic planning involving the allocation of resources critical to marketing success?
• What is meant when it is said that an organization has a marketing mindset?
• How will using the components of marketing fulfill both the needs of the organization and those of the customer?
• Why should a business take the time and effort to write a marketing plan?

The chapter in a few words

• An understanding of how a product can be priced, distributed, and promoted to attract a customer is the basis of marketing. However, implementing marketing requires time, money, and people. To allocate the time, find the funding, and align employee talents with the tasks is the basis of strategic planning.
• An organization demonstrates a marketing mindset when it realizes that it must be aware of how customer needs and wants, along with the external environment, affect its ability to successfully market a product. While any organization is free to produce a product just because it wants to do so, unless there is a customer willing to purchase, there will be no revenue. Therefore, everyone in the organization must understand the marketing process.
• Marketing, rather than just being a means to find customers to purchase a product, is the core of business strategy. The purpose of marketing is to align the mission of the organization with the needs and desires of a group of potential customers. Creative and cultural industries must understand that marketing is not just selling a product but rather a process. Marketing then uses the components, product, price, distribution, and promotion, to fulfill both the mission of the organization and the needs of the customer.
• The process of writing a marketing plan will force the organization to answer difficult questions. An organization may have many ideas for future action, but as resources are limited, the plan will force the organization to make choices. Goals, objectives, and tactics that provide a roadmap of how to achieve these choices and how success can be measured will then be developed.

The relationship between strategic planning and marketing

New definitions for strategy and marketing

The world is much less static than in the past resulting in a new definition of strategy. Because consumers’ wants and needs constantly change as they access the continual stream of online information, the strategic planning process must be dynamic with constant revision as the plan is being implemented. As each action takes place, consumer feedback is assessed to see if changes must be made before the next step is taken.

Strategy old definition: “Create unique and sustainable value by differentiating goods and services.”

Strategy new definition: “Find unique, valuable, and sustainable ways of linking together a firm’s knowledge and skills with customers that will benefit from them.”

How consumers use products has also changed. In the past, a company would provide instructions on product use and expect them to be followed. Now the consumer decides how to use the product and then shares this knowledge online with others. As a result, the company must provide information that suggests how the product can be used to meet the consumer’s needs but must still understand that each customer is unique and may use the product differently.

Strategic marketing old definition: “Create, promote, distribute, and price goods and services to facilitate exchange with the customer.”

Strategic marketing new definition: “Develop a support system with customers to help them to better do their jobs—with a focus on co-creation, dialogue, resource access, and total job execution value.”

Bettencourt, Lusch, and Vargo 2014

QUESTION TO CONSIDER: How often do I search out information online about product use?

So much is changing in the way that consumers purchase and consume products that strategy and marketing may need to be redefined. In the past, the company and the consumer inhabited two different worlds. While the company wanted to learn the wants and needs of the consumer, the company still controlled the production, distribution, and promotion of the product. The first change to this static world was the Internet, which provided the consumer with almost unlimited information on products and companies. The division further broke down when social media allowed the consumer to communicate directly with the company. These changes have resulted in new ways to think about strategy and marketing.

Strategic planning is inherently uncertain and dynamic as customers and resources are constantly changing. The best an organization can do is to evaluate the possibilities for future consumer needs and how it might provide customers with products that meet these needs. Even when the evaluation has been done, the organization must still be ready to quickly adapt to changes. In a changing environment, strategic planning is intentionally repetitive. First, actions are taken to reach goals, while at the same time, consumer feedback is gathered, and the organization continues to evaluate market changes. Inevitable consumer feedback and market changes will mean that adjustments must be made to improve the strategy.

Marketing process—it is not just promotion

No strategy can be accomplished without a plan on how to use the resources of time, people, and money. Marketing strategy involves more than just knowing the components of product, price, distribution, and promotion; it also involves understanding a process of planning the use of resources. The marketing plan starts with writing the mission, vision, and values of the organization. The next step is to analyze the organization’s internal resources such as people, money, and culture. Once this is done, the external environment is scanned to analyze how the economic, socio-cultural, technological, and demographic forces outside of its control will affect the ability to reach strategic goals.

Using a SWOT analysis, all the information from the internal and external environments will need to be examined as to how it will affect the organization’s strategy. A SWOT involves examining the company’s internal strengths and how they can be used to take advantage of external opportunities or to counter external threats. Once this process is complete, the organization must then decide what group of consumers they should target as potential customers. Only now is the company ready to make decisions on product design, pricing, distribution, and promotion. Once the marketing strategy is implemented, it then must be analyzed to determine its success.

Mission, vision, and values—telling everyone who you are and what you believe

Marketing is a strategic process that starts with the mission, vision, and values of the organization. People who do not understand business believe that people in a company will do anything to make money. First, this is untrue because there are legal protections for the consumer. Second, people are too knowledgeable to purchase a product that does not provide the benefits they desire, and if they make a mistake and do so, they will go online to warn everyone else to not purchase the product. Finally, most people have ethical values that they incorporate into all aspects of their daily lives, including their businesses.

By having clearly defined mission, vision, and values, an organization does not need to rely on each employee’s legal knowledge, concerns about poor online reviews or personal values to act in the best interests of the customers and community. Instead, the founders or managers of the company should incorporate the purpose and values of the organization into clearly written statements. These statements should not just be a random listing of vague principles taken off the Internet about providing good products for people. Instead, they should specifically state how the company believes it is not only providing value to consumers by producing products but also what it is doing to make their community and the world a better place. These statements should then be used to guide all the decisions made by the company.

Internal analysis—know thyself

It is critical that everyone in the organization lives up to the mission, but successfully implementing a mission requires a strategy based on available resources. Therefore, the next step in the planning process is to look internally at the resources the company already possesses. This analysis should, of course, include the talents of the people in the organization. The financial resources that are available should also be analyzed as implementing the plan will require money. Other financial assets, including cash, equipment, vehicles, retail stores, entertainment venues, or production facilities, should be analyzed. Finally, the internal culture of the organization needs to be assessed. The culture under which the organization is managed might focus on accomplishing tasks, on maintaining personal relationships within the organization, or on both.

External analysis—know what’s happening everywhere else

Undertaking an external analysis, referred to as environmental scanning, is as critical as the internal analysis. While those involved in the business will already be aware of their internal resources, this is not true of the external environment. Unfortunately, rather than take the time to conduct research on external demographic, socio-cultural, economic, and technological factors, it is easier to simply make assumptions. The problem with this approach is that it is normal human behavior to take an optimistic view of such factors as the desires of potential customers, the strength of the economy needed to support the business, and the ability to incorporate new technology.

However, optimism can be dangerous as decisions based on incorrect assumptions can result in business failure. Instead, the organization must take the necessary time to research the demographic changes in the area where they do business. They must also research the socio-cultural changes as these will affect product preferences. Knowledge of the strength of the current economy is critical in making pricing decisions. Advances in technology will not only affect both how the product is produced but also how it is distributed. Finally, knowledge of competitors is essential in designing an effective promotion strategy.

SWOT analysis—making sense of it all

After analyzing the company’s internal resources and the external environment, the organization will have a large quantity of interesting information. The question is how to make sense of all the data. One tool that can help to do this is the SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The information on internal resources will be analyzed to determine if it includes strengths, such as ready access to start-up funding, or weaknesses, such as lack of marketing knowledge. However, the distinction between something being a strength or weakness is not always so clear. For example, while an organization may have an office in an undesirable location, this is not a weakness if they will not be meeting potential customers at the location. Or it might not be a weakness because, although customers are coming to the location, they are the type of people who would not be attracted to a standard “corporate” type office setting. The determination of whether the presence or lack of a resource is a strength or weakness depends on the mission of the organization.

Opportunities and threats are determined from an analysis of the information uncovered in the environmental scanning of the external environment. For example, an analysis of the demographic characteristics of the community might discover that there are many new residents of a particular age group. It might be an opportunity to target them as potential customers if they are attracted to the product’s benefits. Another example would be socio-cultural changes. It might be learned that many residents are embracing a specific lifestyle, such as living in smaller homes. If this is true, and if the creative product that is produced is small, then there is an opportunity to target people who choose to live in small homes. Threats may be uncovered when analyzing the economic environment. If it is learned that economic growth is low and unemployment high, the threat is that potential customers will not be able to afford the product. The answer is not for the organization to stop producing the product but rather to either lower the price or develop a promotional message that explains why the product is worth the price.

Goals, objectives, and tactics—will get you where you want to go

The purpose of the SWOT analysis is to understand the company’s internal strengths and then match a strength with an external opportunity. This match would then be stated in terms of a goal. A common saying is that a goal without a plan is a dream. A goal is too broad to easily accomplish. Therefore the objectives needed to accomplish the goal must be determined. It is the plan that will make the goal a reality. The strategic marketing plan will usually state the goals in terms of the marketing components that will be affected such as the target market, product, price, distribution, and promotion. Each objective might require more than one tactic. An example, which is far from complete, is shown below.

Examples of goal and objectives

Goal: Target a new customer segment of residents living downtown in small apartments with artwork used as home décor.

• Objective 1: Develop a product in a size easily displayed in a small home.
  • –Tactic: Research number of small homes in the area.
  • –Tactic: Work with designers to develop new product.
• Objective 2: Price the product comparable to other home décor.
  • –Tactic: Research competing products.
  • –Tactic: Determine fixed and variable costs of the new product.
• Objective 3: Distribute the product through downtown boutiques.
  • –Tactic: Contact local boutiques.
  • –Tactic: Negotiate agreements.
• Objective 4: Promote t...