Did You Know ?

Can you name three dimensions of marketing effectiveness?

Marketing can improve its marketing effectiveness through understanding and modeling its customers/consumers, competititors and of course itself. In an ideal world we would have perfect information along each of these dimensions. Unfortunately, in reality, we often only have partial information for any of these. Even understanding the impact of our own actions in the marketplace can sometimes be daunting. Here are four dimensions:

• Customers/Consumers - In order to effectively go to market we must intimately understand the needs and wants of our consumers and customers (the distribution channel). In some industries we sell directly to our end-consumers, either businesses or consumers. In many industries we sell through a channel, as an OEM (e.g. Intel® selling micro-chips to PC Manufacturers, which in turn sell their PC's to distributers, which in turn sell their PC's to stores, such as, CompUSA®, which in turn sell them to us.), a distributor or retailer.
  
• Competitors - Competitors operate under similar constraints to ours. They have budgets, strategies, strengths and weaknesses. When developing our tactics and strategies, if we understand how the competition acts and reacts, we can better develop effective strategies and tactics to drive increased marketing effectiveness.
  
• Corporate - We also have different opportunities to improve our own marketing effectiveness. If we have a bad strategy we can change it and we should be able to drive better tactics which can improve our marketing effectiveness. We can also change our creative concepts and drive improved results. Lastly, we can drive improved tactics by spending more on those tactics with higher returns and less on tactics with lower returns.
  
• Exogenous Factors - We can also improve our marketing effectiveness understanding how factors outside our control can increase or decrease the results from our marketing. Exogenous factors can include the weather, interest rates, government regulation and many others.
  

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