Marketing For Manufacturers

Manufacturers who want to remain viable in today's dynamic marketplace must have their fingers on the pulse of the ever-changing customer demands for quality products and services. Companies can no longer waste valuable time waiting for policies and plans to trickle down from executive boardrooms - consumers expect timely responses to their needs. J. Paul Peter explores the ways manufacturers can use the marketing function to initiate the alignment of manufacturing processes with customer demands. He gives you a detailed analysis of how marketing fits into various organizational structures and product management systems, bringing pertinent marketing and manufacturing issues to light. His logically flowing structure will guide you through the maze of product development, promotion, distribution, and pricing so you can formulate a successful manufacturing-marketing mix that augments customer responsiveness. Inside Marketing for the Manufacturer you will find methods for researching consumer markets and ways to adjust manufacturing, delivery, and inventory policies based on your findings, case studies that reveal real-world techniques for reconciling the differences between manufacturing and marketing functions, and specific strategies marketing professionals use to develop, implement, and measure their programs. Manufacturing managers of the future need to develop integrated solutions to problems that cross traditional functional boundaries. In order to effectively respond to customer demands, they must understand both the tools and concepts associated with the marketing function. The proactive marketing strategies presented in this book will help manufacturing professionals on all levelsheighten their competitive advantage and continuously anticipate, meet, and exceed the expectations of their customers.

Is your small to mid-size manufacturing business the best-kept secret in the market? Are you looking for a series of powerful marketing breakthroughs to change all that? If so, 'Marketing for Manufacturers' is written specifically for you. If you're interested in winning new orders, want new customers, more sales, proven marketing methods, and learning how to avoid numerous costly marketing pitfalls and mistakes, reading 'Marketing for Manufacturers' will give you a series of actionable marketing strategies you can implement in your manufacturing business today! Since 1999, Senior Marketing Advisor, Carl Jarvis, has specialised in advising SME manufacturing businesses, like yours, with increasing your sales and revenues, maximising your profitability, reducing your marketing costs, increasing your customers, developing more cost-effective sales and marketing approaches, and strengthening your business development activities. This book will show you how!

Does this sound familiar? You’ve tried to grow your business but have produced less-than-desired results. You’ve learned that your working capital, cash flow, financial ratios, and overall profitability are insufficient to afford the costs of needed sales, marketing, and promotional strategies typically called for to find and develop new customers, markets, and products. It’s very common that company executives do not follow generally accepted basic business practices such as knowing product costs and margins, obtaining strategically useful information about customers, conducting market research to identify prospective customers, and understanding competitors’ advantages and disadvantages needed to build effective growth strategies. Based on 21 case studies and 126 reviews of manufacturers’ sales and marketing practices, this book explains the common pitfalls so many companies experience, and it offers common sense, practicable, and affordable step-by-step “how to’s” for cost and profitability analyses on products and customers. It will help you find prospective new customers, conduct smart market research, and decipher and use competitor intelligence. It also provides guidelines for determining the best combination of sales coverage for inside/outside sales and independent reps and for estimating the cost to implement sales, marketing, promotional, and growth strategies.

The window of opportunity is open for progressive marketers in the manufacturing sector, but it is slowly closing as the "New Way" to market begins to catch on. Manufacturers who are willing and able to implement the New Way to match their prospective customers' buying strategies will win in their respective markets. Manufacturers must stop pitching their products at the top of the funnel where strong engagement is a differentiator. Instead of pitching products, the winners will engage with the people in their target audience by helping them to be better, relieve a pain point, or enjoy a passion more. Helping them without pitching your product cultivates top-of-mind-awareness (TOMA), credibility, and reciprocity. But there's a catch to being successful. You have to be the first mover, or at least the first in your market to use the New Way to its fullest advantage. The New Way has been tested and proven to work in highly competitive manufacturing markets.

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