Marketing Strategy For Small To Medium Sized Manufacturers

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.

As the media landscape has evolved over the past few years, especially with the emergence of interactive and social media, the philosophy of advertising is significantly changing. Most businesses realize that the days when they relied on three national networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) and a few national newspapers to advertise are gone; thus, they begin to find alternatives to standardized advertising. Many of them begin to adopt more individualized advertising approaches, empowered by Internet technologies. This book outlines three fundamental strategies of advertising: standardized, targeted, and individualized. It describes each strategy in detail and discusses the pros and cons of each. The importance of collecting consumer insights and incorporating those insights into advertising messages are also highlighted. Although a few high-technology companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, are showing success in delivering individualized advertising messages to consumers, this approach (including both personalization and customization) is not suitable for all businesses. No single strategy is absolutely more effective than the others; however, inside you are given a real strategy based on a scrutiny of the value proposition of the business and expectations of consumers.

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!

This book gathers the proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Frontier Computing, held in Singapore, on July 10–13, 2020, and provides comprehensive coverage of the latest advances and trends in information technology, science, and engineering. It addresses a number of broad themes, including communication networks, business intelligence and knowledge management, web intelligence, and related fields that inspire the development of information technology. The respective contributions cover a wide range of topics: database and data mining, networking and communications, web and Internet of things, embedded systems, soft computing, social network analysis, security and privacy, optical communication, and ubiquitous/pervasive computing. Many of the papers outline promising future research directions, and the book benefits students, researchers, and professionals alike. Further, it offers a useful reference guide for newcomers to the field.

Marketers, merchandisers, and sales executives alike are struggling with Big Data - the data streaming at increasing speeds from myriad channels and options for communicating with customers. The tools are likely to continue to multiply, paralyzing many executives with simply too many choices. Using data from a four-year study, this book provides a process for rigorous decision making, eliminating the paralysis and optimizing decision making for marketing performance. This book is intended for a broad audience including students and professors in graduate business schools, and practicing business executives. The goal is to inform marketing practice and help current and future business leaders navigate through the competitive storms unleashed by technological change.

Modern business practice, especially in the field of marketing, depends on the integration of creative and analytical thinking. One of the tools in this process is the use of management models to guide business decisions. However, the inherent power of the models is only released when the people applying them have the ability to gather relevant information and interpret the relationships between the variables in the model. This book examines the role of some of the most popular management models and will help you determine when they should be applied. In addition, it suggests which models may be relevant and, more importantly, identifies the type of information needed to implement them; and also reduces the complexity of these models through a logical and systematic approach. Models recognize the impact of globalization, technology, systems thinking, and the need for an integrated approach in strategic marketing. You’ll find new ones dealing with consumer engagement, gamification, supply chain management, and cultural integration. If you’re a student of business and marketing, a junior market researcher, or a manager responsible for the preparation of strategic analyses prior to problem-solving and planning sessions, this book is for you!

Modern consumers are being bombarded with in-formation from every angle. They can’t handle it and, consequently, tune out large portions of the information. Consumers, therefore, often enter service transactions with predetermined men-tal scripts regarding how they predict the trans-actions will transpire and are not paying close attention. In order to gain their full attention, firms must find ways to surprise consumers dur-ing transactions; that is, firms must spawn mental script deviations for them. Research indicates that these script deviations can cement consumer loyalty. This book details how to create a surprise culture in a service firm. Because a consumer can only be “surprised” by a given tactic one time and surprise ideas can be copied by competitors, a firm with a culture that generates and implements a constant stream of surprise tactics is one that has the higher edge in achieving success in the modern envi-ronment of information overload.

Smart branding is essential for success, yet it is often misunderstood. Developing a brand that is relevant, distinct, and emotionally compelling can be very dif_ cult for many managers, mainly because they don’t realize exactly what and how much goes into this branding process. This book will explain this process. In an easy-to-understand writing style, Gronlund will show you the fundamentals that will help develop a value proposition that will excite customers. Branding is all about creating a message or an impression that makes an impact and creates a rational and emotional connection with a customer. Forming a bond of trust and comfort will build brand equity (i.e., how people value your brand) and customer loyalty. We are living in a dynamic, transformative global economy with mind-boggling advances in technology. Managers today can easily become preoccupied with social media vehicles and the innovative features of electronic devices, and hence neglect the importance of the content or the message. Adhering to the core elements of positioning and branding will help them develop more emotionally rich and powerful content. And B2B managers will better understand and discover the real value of good branding, so that their marketing and sales communications will go beyond product features and emphasize relevant benefits that will strengthen their relationships with targeted customers.