By its very nature, a Marketing Management course could cover all the aspects of marketing decision-making: strategic positioning, development of products and services, optimization of sales and promotions, targeted advertising, customer retention, even pricing. As such, each model in the Enginius package could be introduced at one point or another in a Marketing Management course. But if your course covers only a few marketing models, these are the ones we recommend in priority…
Whether it’s about designing a new product, communicating about the benefits of a service, or pricing an existing offering, one of the tenets of a good marketing strategy is to understand that no product or service can please everyone. To fine-tune their marketing strategy, managers need to identify and target the right customers, and understand how their needs differ from the rest of the market. And there is nothing better to drive that point home than a good segmentation case study, such as the FLIP, ISBM or Pacific Brands business cases.
Every customer would like the highest quality at the lowest price; it is when they have to trade-off between price and quality that they differ. To quantify customers’ preferences is key in developing new offerings, predicting market shares, or setting optimal prices. Conjoint analysis helps your students think about customers’ preferences more systematically. If you have already covered segmentation in class, case studies like Kirin Beer or Dürr Environmental would be ideal, since they require students to segment preferences elicited from a conjoint analysis, hence linking these two methods together.
Whether it is used to identify market opportunities, competitive threats, or ways to make advertising more coherent and effective, positioning analysis is useful to analyze how a company’s current brand is perceived by the marketplace. The positioning module in Enginius also allows to overlay preferences, and graphically group these customers preferences into segments, hence linking the previous two modules together.
Like all limited resources, marketing resources (be it advertising dollars, sales reps, or promotional efforts) need to be both sized and allocated optimally. Based on managerial input, the resource allocation module in Enginius helps you teach concepts such as optimal sizing, flat maximum, opportunity costs, and decreasing returns –all essential concepts in marketing management–.
