This blog that I will be keeping
throughout the semester will be in an effort to break down the concepts and
strategies covered over the course of BU-215, aka Intro to Marketing. There is
some history of marketing experiences in my life but taking a full semester
course should prove to be an enlightening experience on the subject. My formal
introduction to marketing, at least in a scholastic sense, came during a short
module of the BU-113 course that lacked depth and detailed coverage of the
material, but was successful in teaching the most basic concepts of marketing
and how it should be applied to the product we were selling in the marketplace
portion of that course. All of the rest of my history and acquaintance with
marketing is specific to personal marketing and comes from an earlier time in
my life when hockey played a much bigger role. In an effort to keep moving
forward along the path I desired I was constantly trying to get noticed and
“sell” my skills to coaches and programs I wanted to be a part of, during high
school, I had to apply and market myself to prep schools, in prep school I had
to market myself to junior teams, and in juniors I had to market apply and myself
to colleges. I knew nothing of marketing terminology at the time, or even that
I was applying marketing concepts in any way, but looking back now with an
understanding of some basics, it is clear to see the similarities between
marketing myself and what is needed to market a product or service for profit.
Marketing is defined in our textbook
as the activity for creating, delivering and exchanging offerings that benefit
its customers, the organization, its stakeholders, and society at large.
Admittedly, there are vast differences between me trying to get noticed for a
hockey team and a fully planned, multiple medium, large scale marketing effort
but both can be broken down using tools such as the 4 P’s and SWOT analysis.
Using the 4 P’s, Product, Place, Price, and Promotion, you could say the
product was my abilities, the place was wherever I was playing, the price would
be my performance once on their team, and my promotion was my performance on my
current team. When marketing a product, it is also important to pay attention
to all of these aspects and what approach will work best given your product and
target market. SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and
threats; an analysis of these will give you an idea of where you are and what
you need to do in the future to become more relevant or stay relevant in your
market.
The topics of this blog will
continue to roughly parallel the lessons and topics of the class, ideally using
different forms and media to convey new ideas.
