In the previous article titled “Adopting Marketing, The Winds Of Change” I had summarized the first serious steps taken by our company to adopt the strategic deployment of marketing functions. As the markets evolved and the technology continued to develop the operation scope for marketing became larger.
Marketing was becoming the center of activities for the whole company. After the initial technical investment, the marketing had the highest budget to spend. The marketing role was dominating over the sales and was the reason to start the customer care department. Being the commercial head of the company seemed to be unfit anymore to anyone who is not able to understand the marketing basics.
The rise in the competition was the main reason for establishing marketing as one of the essential if not the essential department in the company. The competition not only helped in the rise of the marketing role, but also put pressure to initiate innovative ideas that included a different approach in Customer care, along with other media used to promote the company and its products.
This stage is an ongoing one and although it involves many developments it rather seems like a repetitive cycle with one task in mind, how to beat the competition. All aims and targets that included profitability seemed unrealizable if we are not one step ahead of our competition. There is a multitude of tasks, aims, targets, methods, and variables that rule this phase but I will identify only some of the major ones I am facing.
One thing that I would like to mention though, that became part of the official communication terminology used by many companies when they address their customers: Being Customer Oriented. Although it may be a subject of some of my future articles, I would rather use the term customer friendly. In my beginning years in mobile telecoms our product was purely technical, these days this approach would put us out of business if still adopted. Customer care meant that we were able to tell the customers why they are having technical problems, these days we have an array of excuses to use, in a friendly way.
The marketing mix at this stage looks as follows:
- Product: Well defined (mature) products with constant addition of value added services linked to the main product or depending on it. The new services offered include the help desk (also known as hot line, customer care line, etc…)
- Price: Direct involvement of the marketing department in pricing based on comparison and benchmarking while analyzing costs.
- Place: Physical presence including direct and indirect channels mainly for physical products such as the SIM card (We are talking about developing countries where shipping may not sound as easy as it may sound). Virtual presence for other types of products and services such as top up (adding credit to your prepaid account) switching services on and off, etc… For the virtual approach it relies on the market maturity but solutions such as SMS (Short Messaging System). USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data), Web (Including access via WAP, GPRS, HSDPA, Wimax, etc…)
- Promotion: Includes classic media (TV, Radio, Newspapers, Billboards, Printed material, Promotion articles, etc…) and other media that include Web, SMS, MMS, etc…
As you can notice, the tasks of the marketing multiplied and so did the expectations. Although many marketing activities can be noticed by the public, many, including colleagues within the company do not realize that there are other marketing activities that happen in the background whose role is to provide reliable data and analysis to support one marketing approach or the other.
Marketing did not prove itself overnight, at least when it comes to my career, and that is why I consider it to be the dearest activity among all the commercial responsibilities I have at my work. In future articles I will discuss other marketing activities and applications.
