Relation between marketing and other functional areas of management
Answers
Marketing management employs tools from economics and competitive strategy to analyze the industry context in which the firm operates. These include Porter's five forces, analysis of strategic groups of competitors, value chain analysis and others.[1]
In competitor analysis, marketers build detailed profiles of each competitor in the market, focusing on their relative competitive strengths and weaknesses using SWOT analysis. Marketing managers will examine each competitor's cost structure, sources of profits, resources and competencies, competitive positioning and product differentiation, degree of vertical integration, historical responses to industry developments, and other factors.
Marketing management often conduct market research and marketing research to perform marketing analysis. Marketers employ a variety of techniques to conduct market research, but some of the more common include:
Qualitative marketing research, such as focus groups and various types of interviews
Quantitative marketing research, such as statistical surveys
Experimental techniques such as test markets
Observational techniques such as ethnographic(on-site) observation
Marketing managers may also design and oversee various environmental scanning and competitive intelligence processes to help identify trends and inform the company's marketing analysis.
Brand auditEdit
A brand audit is a thorough examination of a brand's current position in an industry compared to its competitors and the examination of its effectiveness. When it comes to brand auditing, six questions should be carefully examined and assessed:
how well the business’ current brand strategy is working,
what the company's established resource strengths and weaknesses are,
what its external opportunities and threats are,
how competitive the business’ prices and costs are,
how strong the business’ competitive position in comparison to its competitors is, and
what strategic issues are facing the business.
When a business is conducting a brand audit, the goal is to uncover business’ resource strengths, deficiencies, best market opportunities, outside threats, future profitability, and its competitive standing in comparison to existing competitors. A brand audit establishes the strategic elements needed to