Need a marketing plan? Below are six critical elements to a good marketing plan:
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Archive for the ‘General Marketing’ Category
Six Elements To A Good Marketing Plan
Friday, February 17th, 2012What Is A Mission Statement?
Friday, February 17th, 2012A good mission statement navigates the direction of your small business. Below is a brief video covering the elements of a good mission statement:
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Twenty-five Segmentation Variables for Consumer Markets: Dr. Phillip Kotler
Friday, December 16th, 2011Segmentation is the key to good marketing. If you don’t segment, you waste time, money, and sales-both on the marketer and customer end of things. Dr. Philip Kotler, in this classic text, Marketing Management (14th Edition, p. 215), lists 25 major segment variables for consumer markets:
- Geographic region
- City or metro size
- Density
- Climate
- Demographic age
- Family size
- Family life cycle
- Gender
- Income
- Occupation
- Education
- Religion
- Race
- Generation
- Nationality
- Social class
- Psychographic lifestyle
- Personality
- Behavioral occasions
- Benefits
- User status
- Usage rate
- Loyalty status
- Readiness stage
- Attitude toward product
So before you just market and attempt to sell your product or service, slice and dice the above list and make sure you know the matches. Each one above is a question you should ask yourself. Each of these will also break down into sub-categories. Don’t just market to the mass.
Think rifle and not shotgun. Specific and not general. Drop and not ocean. Address and not zip code.
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Small Businesses Credit Scores: Does It Matter?
Saturday, November 26th, 2011“A positive credit score can improve your ability to obtain financing, and spot weaknesses among suppliers, vendors, competitors and employees.”
– Gary Stem, Small Business Review
$1 – What is a credit score?
Credit scores help a bank determine the probability that you will pay back your loan. Credit scores range between 300 and 850 with the standards of each range depicted in the diagram below. Your credit score is determined by how quickly you pay off obligations (such as loans or credit card payments), your consistency, the amount you borrow, the number of credit cards you own, and the length of your credit history. The sooner you start building a good credit score, the sooner you can start building your business.
$2 – How can you improve your credit score?
To achieve a good credit score, it is important to make the monthly payments on time. Having a late payment or missing payment can negatively affect your credit score. Also, defaulting on any loan (including student loan, home loans, or car loans) could ruin your credit. Most individuals starting a small business use their own credit score to obtain a start-up-loan. How you spend your money now will determine what funding you can receive in the future for your company. According to Stuart Atkins, you should try and only use “40% of your credit limit.” By keeping a manageable amount of credit, you can successfully pay off your debts in a reasonable amount of time and continuously increase your credit score by showing you can successfully and consistently manage your balances.
$3 – What are the effects?
A small business needs a good credit score to acquire start-up funds. With a good credit score you can obtain a better interest rate and possibly a higher loan amount. It is difficult for a small business to compete financially with other businesses if it is unable to acquire funding. A good credit score reflects positively on your business. Try to work with other companies and suppliers that also have good credit to ensure that they are reliable and will be able to meet their current and future obligations. Dun and Bradstreet (http://www.dnb.com/) can be used to view credit reports of companies. A good credit score can help a small business develop good relations with lender and suppliers for future projects.
Read more about how credit scores affect small businesses in Gary M. Stern’s article “Knowing your Credit Score Can Pay Off”
http://smallbusinessreview.com/finance/credit_score_financing/
“When your debt goes up, your score goes down. When you pay a little off it goes the other way around.”
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Note: The preceding post was written and researched by students in my Honors Marketing 351, Fall 2011 class, from the Mihaylo College of Business and Economics, Cal State Fullerton University, Fullerton California. Many thanks to their time, talent, and contributions to both their career and this marketing blog. Go Titans!
Ready, Set, Retail: A Starbucks Success Story
Saturday, November 26th, 2011For a small business, selling to a well-known retailer is key in promoting their product towards a large customer base. Retailing is all activities directly related to the sale of goods and services to the ultimate consumer. If small businesses cannot manage to open their own retail locations or make a profit by selling directly to their customers, they can always sell their products through larger retailers, such as Starbucks. Starbucks falls under the specialty store which specializes in a certain type of merchandise; in this case coffee, tea, snacks, and a relaxing atmosphere.
In the article, A Small Player Breaks Into Starbucks, a perfect example of retailing is demonstrated by Daniel Lubetzky, CEO of KIND Fruit + Nut Bars and Starbucks Corporation. Lubetzky’s retail marketing plan was to choose the proper promotion strategy, location, and presentation of the retail store, also known as the retailing mix. He persisted in selling his products to Starbucks because he believed the brand fit perfectly with his product. Both Starbucks and KIND aimed to appeal to the health conscious customer, making the implementation of KIND bars ideal.
KIND Healthy Snacks offered its product, Fruit + Nut bar, to Starbucks locations. The goal of the promotion strategy for KIND Healthy Snacks was the same for Starbucks: to help position the product in the consumers’ minds. Starbucks, as a retailer, tends to use public relations and publicity at the forefront of its promotion strategy capitalizing on giving back to the community and helping non-profit organizations. As a proper location, KIND Healthy Snacks chose a ‘store within a store.’ This is a method for smaller specialty lines to bring their products inside larger stores while expanding retail opportunities without risking investment in an entirely separate store. Although KIND Fruit+ Nut Bars is not a complete store within Starbucks, it is still a way for this specialty line to sell within the larger corporation without taking on additional risk.
A small business sometimes needs the help of a well-established organization to climb up the corporate consumer ladder. In the case of Lubetzky’s KIND bars, Starbucks was the reputable organization that lifted the brand up the ladder.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/businRetaess/smallbusiness/01snackbar.html?ref=retailing
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Note: The preceding post was written and researched by students in my Honors Marketing 351, Fall 2011 class, from the Mihaylo College of Business and Economics, Cal State Fullerton University, Fullerton California. Many thanks to their time, talent, and contributions to both their career and this marketing blog. Go Titans!
