This blog is becoming quite personal with all of these reflections isn't it? Regardless, I'm doing another now but, instead of being marketed to as in the last one, I'm doing the marketing. In another of my classes my group and I were tasked with creating a business plan. Now, we're just in the early stages of forming a plan but I have had to exercise my marketing muscle quite a lot already. This assignment really made me think about the very basics of marketing. How you ask? We had to come up with a product to sell so even the most basic parts of marketing like, "would my customer even consider buying this?" pop up.
Marketing is about giving value to your customer. So, how does one go about doing that? First, it really helps if they can actually use whatever it is that you're selling. We had to consider if anyone anywhere would have any sort of need for a product like ours. After some help from our professor and putting our heads together we came up with a few ideas for businesses that we could market to. This is contrary to where I thought most would start their marketing efforts. I assumed that general public was the way to go. However, it makes sense to start at a business that has a legitimate need for multiple copies of what you need. Once we had some ideas of who we we're selling to we came up with a little information about how much we might sell to them. We also decided that continuing to sell on a business only level would be ideal until we can get it right for general public consumers.
So, with a viable idea for a product in mind and someone to market to how do you find out if your customer actually wants to buy something? Well, i'm not sure because that'll come later in the project! But, this post is about how your perceptions of marketing are always changing. Your knowledge on the subject is ever expanding and when you use it in real life situations it seems like you learn even faster.
Marketing is about giving value to your customer. So, how does one go about doing that? First, it really helps if they can actually use whatever it is that you're selling. We had to consider if anyone anywhere would have any sort of need for a product like ours. After some help from our professor and putting our heads together we came up with a few ideas for businesses that we could market to. This is contrary to where I thought most would start their marketing efforts. I assumed that general public was the way to go. However, it makes sense to start at a business that has a legitimate need for multiple copies of what you need. Once we had some ideas of who we we're selling to we came up with a little information about how much we might sell to them. We also decided that continuing to sell on a business only level would be ideal until we can get it right for general public consumers.
So, with a viable idea for a product in mind and someone to market to how do you find out if your customer actually wants to buy something? Well, i'm not sure because that'll come later in the project! But, this post is about how your perceptions of marketing are always changing. Your knowledge on the subject is ever expanding and when you use it in real life situations it seems like you learn even faster.