Introduction

This is a report on topics learnt in marketing and communications including the experience with Edumundo Sim Game. The report will explain what marketing is and why companies use marketing to gain attention and profit from consumers and how it is done. Evaluating the marketing strategies used in the Sim game and an appendix showing the results of the game.

What is Marketing?

A company focuses on providing customer service and building a relationship with customers (Fahy. J & Jobber.D,2015).

It is not just the action of selling, advertising and promoting a brand, product or service. It is to meet the needs, wants and demands of customers. Creating value for customers and building a relationship to consumers to gain loyalty as well as good reputation and profit. Without making a relationship with the customers the business, product or service may not flourish. It is used to raise awareness, educate, connect, share and make money (Kotler.P, Armstrong.G, Wong. V, Saunders.J, 2008). Marketing is complex, there are different ways and meaning to market also marketing is everywhere in every place and it is not just for the organisation/business gain but for personal gain e.g. when going to a job interview, selling yourself is a part of marketing. This brings to the next topic explaining how marketing works.

Old vs New

The old and traditional process of marketing involves ‘telling and selling’. The new processes of marketing are satisfying customer needs (Kotler.P, Armstrong.G, Wong. V, Saunders.J, 2008).

Looking through the decades, Newspapers, Magazines, Television, Radio, person interactions and Word of Mouth had been used as a marketing process (Peter and Olson, 2010). Businesses and organisations would sell products and services then customers would trust the companies on the claim the service and products are the best.

As time passed the new process of marketing had been to advertise through building a relationship with customers using the same methods of marketing such as television. The internet has revolved and expanded over the years and has been largely used to market and connect to customers. Sources such as Social media, Blogs and through public figures such as celebrities have been mostly used to attract new customers and to retain the loyalty of existing clients (Evans, Jamal and Foxall, 2013).

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A 7-member South Korean boyband called Bangtan Sonyeondan also known as BTS has become the world’s biggest boyband since the Beatles. How? although Non-Korean fans do not understand the language stated in the music the boyband has a strong relationship with the band’s fans called ARMY. Interviews by the fans have said the boyband’s music inspires the fans to love themselves and cheers the fans up. An example of a business and customer relationship that has benefited the music entertainment company by people streaming, downloading, purchasing the music and receiving million-dollar contracts from advertising companies. Also, it has benefited the customers and fans by connecting to the boy bands music and the boyband (www.vulture.com).

Businesses and organisations would start by coordinating and designing a marketing strategy understanding the wants and needs of customers. Once coordinating an effective marketing strategy. The business plans the business strategy using the marketing mix.

Services marketing

As mentioned before about BTS influence on fans as an example of a business/organisation and customer relationship (www.vulture.com,2018), services can be used as marketing and examples of organisations/Businesses that use their services as marketing are restaurants, hotels, spas, banks etc. Service marketing creates a social and cultural movement that circulate contemporary society and society and draw on trends that form marketing practices meaning service or experience marketing forms a culture or social movement also creating a trend (Tresidder and Hirst, 2011).

 Years ago, customers would trust the company/organisations slogans and marketing tactic, believing that whatever the company is selling it will work until proven otherwise. Nowadays customers have become quite savvy with products and services, they do their research online or reading the back of a label to determine whether they work or not. They don’t trust the old tradition marketing tactic of showing and telling but instead would do try for themselves, ask questions or find information themselves (Fahy and Jobber, 2015).

Scene Setting Information

What was learnt in marketing and communications is it teaches the principles of marketing and understanding the consumers and the business/organisations purpose of marketing. 

The 7 P’s

 The 7P’s come from the marketing mix that is a set of a controllable tactical marketing tool (principles of marketing). The 7 P’s are:

Place- goods or services the business or organization offers.

Price-What Customers Pay.

Promotion- How it is published.

Place- The destination.

Packaging – Packaging of the product

Positioning- how it is positioned in the hearts and minds of the customers.

People – The Consumers, employees etc.

Companies/organisations plan their marketing strategy based on 4 of the 7 P’s and then continue onto the other 3 (Kotler et al., 2010).

Marketing trends

Every year new trends emerge in marketing and technology plays hand in hand with marketing such as businesses and organisations using Google and social media to advertise. In 2019 onwards, technology will continue to be used as a platform to market. According to Forbes (Forbes.com,2019), customers will be empowered as brand ambassadors by companies asking them to share information on a product for their own network. Companies will use transparency to connect to customers, Customers will seek expertise, reviews and feedback on brands, products and services and lastly, integration of online, social and mobile marketing.

According to Entrepreneur (entrepreneur.com, 2019), chatbots will continue to be a trend as not everyone wants to talk to a real person so chatbots will largely provide customer service. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in effect, consumers are more cautious of security and how businesses are handling data and marketers are now focusing on Gen Z as they are getting older and marketers have already evaluated millennials, Gen Z will be researched and evaluated my market researchers to see how they may change the economy.

Consumer behaviour

What is consumer behaviour? Consumer behaviour is the action or choice of purchasing something at a place or online. A customer may walk into a grocery store and think “I need to by milk because I ran out of it this morning” or  a customer may sit at home and think “I can not be bothered to go to the shops to buy this, I’m going to buy it on Amazon” and it is also the action of a consumer finding a product or service and thinking “where can I find a better deal better than this one”. It is the psychological and physical reaction of a consumer (Peter and Olson, 2010).

Edumundo Sim Game

The Edumundo game had been a hands-on experience learning how to run a business based on 4 of the 7 p’s. Working with a team brings challenges of working together, agreeing and disagreeing on decision making. Working with a team teaches oneself not only what it is like working with a team but the type of person they are in the team. Learning how to market using the Edumundo Sim game had been challenging at first also by navigating through the website and planning good marketing strategies and learning from the mistakes of past quarters had been a positive learning experience. As each week went by myself and the team had learned effective marketing techniques and consumer behaviour.

Marketing Plan

N.V.US strengths in the SIM game had been:

The sales revenue had improved each week

 Brand loyalty on men and women improved

gross profit had improved from quarter 5.

The team was able to assess each quarter and made corrections to improve the sales of the jeans. The brand loyalty had been good for the team because gaining loyalty from both sexes meant a steady profit and sales which had improved form quarter 5.

N.V.US weakness had been:

The operating profit decreasing to minus each week.

between quarter 2 to 5 the gross profit had decreased.

 What could have been changed is the team could have made more effort in planning an effective marketing strategy and how to avoid minuses in the operating profit. The team had realised that the pricing was set too high therefore resulting in people not buying many jeans. The group could have done better to evaluate what was going wrong and tried different ways to improve such as starting the pricing at a lower price going up as the weeks went by.

The team could have set the quality on medium as the quality may have been set a little bit high as well.  The team had not done much work at the beginning of the sim game and did not write much justifying our decisions, what could have been done differently is that the team could have worked harder on the sim game to not only do better but to learn more about marketing strategy.

Conclusion

As a conclusion to this report, marketing is complex and essential for businesses and the economy. Learning about marketing strategies, consumer behaviours and how marketing works can help improve business/organisations and to keep watch of future trends in marketing. It is understood why and how market researchers evaluate consumers and it is to monitor any changes in customer consumption as time goes by.

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Appendix: MyMarketing SIM report