Keywords: marketing manager, marketing mix, day-to-day marketing
Marketing is still an art, and the marketing manager, as head chef, must creatively marshal all his marketing activities to advance the short and long term interests of his firm.
By NEIL H . BORDEN - Harvard Business School
When building a marketing program to fit the needs of his firm, the marketing manager has to weigh the behavioral forces and then juggle marketing elements in his mix with a keen eye on the resources with which he has to work. His firm is but one small organism in a large universe of complex forces. His firm is only a part of an industry that is competing with many other industries. What does the firm have in terms of money, product line, organization, and reputation with which to work? The manager must devise a mix of procedures that fit these resources. If his firm is small, he must judge the response of consumers, trade, and competition in light of his position and resources and the influence that he can exert in the market. He must look for special opportunities in product or method of operation. The small firm cannot employ the procedures of the big firm. Though he may sell the same kind of product as the big firm, his marketing strategy is likely to be widely different in many respects. Innumerable instanees of this fact might be cited. For example, in the industrial goods field, small firms often seek to build sales on a limited and highly specialized line, whereas industry leaders seek patronage for full lines. Small firms often elect to go in for regional sales rather than attempt the national dis tribution practiced by larger companies. Again, the company of limited resources often eleets to limit its production and sales to products whose potential is too small to attract the big fellows. Still again, companies with small resources in the co,smetic field not infrequently have set tip introductory marketing programs employing aggre,ssive personal selling and a "push" strategy with distribution limited to leading department stores. Their initially small advertising funds have been directed through these selected retail otitlets. with the offering of the products and their story told over the signattires of the stores. The strategy has been to borrow kudos for their products from the leading stores' reputations and to gain a gradual radiation of distribution to smaller stores in all types of channels, such as often comes from the trade's follow-the-leader behavior. Only after resources have grown from mounting sales has a dense retail distribution been aggressively so tight and a shift made to place the selling burden more and more on company-signed advertising.
The above strategy was employed for Toni products and Stoppette deodorant in their early marketing stages when the resources of their producers were limited (cf. case of Jules Montenier, Inc. in Borden and Marshall, 1959, pp. 498-518). In contrast, cosmetic manufacturers with large resources have generally followed a "pull" strategy for the introduction of new prodticts, relying on heavy (ampaigiLS of advertising in a rapid succes,sion of area introductions to induce a hoped-for, complete retail coverage from the start (cf. case of Bristol Myers Company in Borden and Marshall, 1959, pp. 519-533). These introductory campaigns have been undertaken only after careful programs of prodtict development and test marketing have given assurance that product and selling plans had high promise of success.
Long vs. Short Term Aspects of Marketing Mix
The marketing mix of a firm in large part is the product of the evolution that comes from day-to-day marketing. At any time the mix represents the program that a management has evolved to meet the problems with which it is constantly faced in an ever changing, ever challenging market. There are continuous tactical maneuvers: a new product, aggressive promotion, or price change initiated by a competitor must be considered and met; the failure of the trade to provide adequate market coverage or display must be remedied; a faltering sales force must be reorganized and stimulated; a decline in sales share must be diagnosed and remedied; an advertising approach that has lost effectiveness must be replaced; a general business decline must be countered. All such problems call for a management's maintaining effective channels of information relative to its own operations and to the dayto- day behavior of consumers, competitors, and the trade. Thus, we may observe that short range forces play a large part in the fashioning of the mix to be used at any time and in determining the allocation of expenditures among the various functional accounts of the ... Read more
