Marketing

Study the important business function of marketing, which is the action or business of promoting and selling products or services. To be successful, it typically requires marketing research in order to better understand and target customers. In addition to advertising and sales promotions, marketing also encompasses product development, packaging, distribution channels, pricing, and many other functions.

Marketing involves the coordination of what is known as the 4 Ps of marketing: product, place, promotion, and price.

Product

“Product” relates to the development of the right product or service for the selected target group, usually involving market research and analysis such as focus groups, in order to determine how well the new product or service meets the wants and needs of the target group. A pivotal consideration in product planning and development is branding, whereby the good or service is positioned in the market according to its brand name.
Place

“Place” relates to getting the product or service to the target market at the right time and in the proper quantity. A successful strategy will likely require coordination between the company selling the product and those in various distribution channels, including retail, wholesale, and catalog.
Promotion

“Promotion” relates to sales, advertising, public relations, digital marketing, content marketing, and other activities that communicate information intended to influence consumer behavior. Three major types of promotions are personal selling, mass selling, and sales promotions. Personal selling refers to face-to-face or telephone sales; mass selling encompasses advertising on mass media, such as online, television, radio, direct mail, and print publications. Sales promotions are the stimulation of sales through contests, demonstrations, discounts, exhibitions or trade shows, games, giveaways, special offers, and other similar activities.
Price

“Price” refers to the determination of payment or compensation given and involves the use of discounts and long-term pricing goals, as well as the consideration of demographic and geographic influences. Marketing must take into account the price point of competitors’ products, what the market has demonstrated it is willing to pay for the good or service, and the cost of producing the good or service when setting a price.

Traditionally marketing relied heavily on pitching products through advertisements on television, the radio, newspapers, and billboards. Direct mail was an effective avenue for promoting new products. Today many companies use a mix of traditional marketing and digital marketing strategies to influence revenue across their organization.

Digital marketing strategies are typically formed in collaboration across teams and include the integration of digital collateral (marketing literature), advertising, social media marketing, and email marketing. Digital content creation can include marketing teams creating white papers, case studies, blogs, videos, and infographics. Types of digital advertising include pay-per-click advertisements (PPC) and social media ads such as Facebook ads. Social media marketing is a plan to build awareness of a business or product using social media networks. Popular social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Email marketing is the use of email to promote a business brand, product, or services and develop and maintain relationships with customers.

A key component to effective marketing is measuring return on investment (ROI) using marketing analytics to create data-driven marketing strategies by reporting metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Marketing analytics allows businesses to monitor marketing campaigns and outcomes of digital marketing strategies, social media strategies, and content marketing strategies. Marketing analytics provides insights into sales and lead generation, conversion rates, and customer preferences and trends; and overall marketing trends by analyzing engagement including views, downloads, and clicks to ensure each marketing dollar is spent effectively.

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Marketing Resources

Gale provides digital products to the study of marketing including marketing databases, analytic services, and marketing eBooks.

Databases

Gale databases include articles from marketing publications that can be used to understand advertising, digital marketing, content marketing, social media, and marketing tools.

Gale databases include a variety of marketing publications offering marketers and researchers access to credible, up-to-date content from marketing publications including abstracts and full-text articles from scholarly journals, periodicals, and trade publications.

Gale OneFile: Communications and Mass Media

Gale OneFile: Communications and Mass Media brings together information found in more than 400 journals, with nearly 3 million articles on all aspects of the communications field, including advertising, public relations, linguistics, and literature, including full-text marketing articles from ADWEEK, Journal of the Academic of Marketing Science, Ad Age, and Campaign.

Business Insights: Global

Business Insights: Global is a unique source for international business intelligence, offering the most comprehensive and convenient way to find case studies, in-depth statistical data coupled with deep research, and the ability to compare global economies, countries, and industries—including trade and scholarly journals focused on advertising, marketing, and public relations, and international markets and marketing.

Digital Services

Gale provides tools for libraries to conduct marketing research to improve engagement with their patrons.

Gale Engage

Gale Engage is a software service for public libraries that provides tools to help improve engagement with patrons, including email and social media marketing management.

Gale Analytics

Gale Analytics provides librarians and administrators with the capability to pair public library's usage data with demographic visualizations of their community to conduct research to inform planning, programming, collections, and marketing outreach efforts, allowing users to make more informed decisions that lead to more strategic marketing plans and better outcomes. Features include saving dashboard outputs to share data visuals, manipulating data to target different demographics, and exporting marketing mailing lists to use for promotions.

Gale eBooks

Gale offers a variety of marketing eBooks that can be added to a customized collection and cross-searched to pinpoint relevant content and workflow tools enable users to share, save, and download content.

Encyclopedia of Major Marketing Strategies, Vol. 4

Encyclopedia of Major Marketing Strategies, Vol. 4

Gale | 2019 | ISBN-13: 9781410389336

The fourth edition of the Encyclopedia of Major Marketing Strategies (EMMS) builds on the foundation of the first three volumes, covering 100 marketing campaigns by some of the top global brands and high-profile social movements of the last few years. Essays are aligned to the strategic marketing framework, ensuring that the marketing strategies can easily be utilized in an academic setting as case studies, or illustrative examples often described as “war stories” by professors. The essays in EMMS are presented alphabetically by brand or company in a single volume. Essays on organizations such as Bonds, Ikea, Kenzo, and Sanlam explore strategies outside of the United States and touch on some of the different methods an overseas marketing effort might employ. EMMS also examines green marketing in essays such as Patagonia’s “The Refuge” and Scott’s “Green Screen.”

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Branding with Powerful Stories: The Villains, Victims, and Heroes Model, 1st Edition

Branding with Powerful Stories: The Villains, Victims, and Heroes Model, 1st Edition

Praeger | 2019 | ISBN-13: 9781440864780

Compelling stories exalt, motivate, and acculturate every worker in an enterprise. They also attract customers and media alike. Imagine an elderly man, snowed in, unable to shop for groceries until a supermarket comes to the rescue and delivers his food. The story of this company going out of its way to help a customer will resonate with consumers and employees. This title explains how to tell a captivating story, and what elements—namely villains, victims, and heroes—it should include in the first place. This approach is based on the notion that in business messaging, the villains may just be your best friends. Villains are simply any problems that cause pain, discomfort, or extra expense for customers, who are in effect the victims. Heroes offer real solutions to customers' predicaments, and there is nothing more powerful than communicating that message and making sure your potential customers remember it.

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Building Brand Identity in the Age of Social Media: Emerging Research and Opportunities, 1st Edition

Building Brand Identity in the Age of Social Media: Emerging Research and Opportunities, 1st Edition

Business Science Reference | 2018 | ISBN-13: 9781522551447

To survive in today’s competitive business environment, marketing professionals must look to develop innovative methods of reaching their customers and stakeholders. Social media is a useful tool for developing relationships between businesses and consumers. Building Brand Identity in the Age of Social Media: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical scholarly resource that examines the media consumption and habits of consumers to evaluate the challenges of brand building. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as brand identity, brand loyalty, and social media branding, this title is geared towards marketing professionals, business managers, and individuals interested in how social media fits into today’s marketing environments.

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