Week 10 Final post

  Having read articles on cases of marketing strategies, there was much for me to know about successful companies' methods of establishing their brands and developing their relationships with customers. Most impressive were the strength of companies like Coca-Cola that continuously send a simple brand message (Example: happiness). I thought that such consistency gives customers a sense of security and familiarity, leading to long-term brand equity.
 Also, the business model of establishing relationships with potential customers through the provision of free tools and educational content, such as in the example of HubSpot, is a great way of building trust on the basis of "value provision" rather than sales. This allows companies to build the groundwork for long-term relationships rather than a focus on short-term sales.
 Moreover, Spotify's provision of personalized experiences (Example: playlists) for every user is an excellent example of technology and marketing integration, and I realized that "how to provide experiences that resonate with every customer" begets competitive advantage.
 Through this article, I realized that marketing strategy is not a tool to promote and sell goods, but a total effort to set the philosophy of a company and build customer relationships. Despite the age or changes in the industry, "consistency, value creation, and customer perspective" are shared keywords that I would like to keep in mind when I communicate or plan something in the future.

Reference:
https://coschedule.com/marketing-strategy/marketing-strategy-examples

Five Key Takeaways from the Course

1. The importance of understanding the nature of the value proposition
 I came to understand that marketing is not necessarily a sales function, but rather establishing "what value means to the customer" and how to deliver it. In particular, I believed that the STP (segmentation, targeting, positioning) process could be applied to product design and concept development even as an engineer.

2. The applied uses of marketing research
 There must be decisions based on actual marketplace data, not guessing, when considering new products or services. More particularly, I realized that the decision process, e.g., "problem clarification," "data collection," and "evaluation of alternatives," can be applied in my own research and design as an engineer.

3. Knowledge of the consumer decision process leads to product design
 By the process of "awareness → information search → evaluation of alternatives → purchase → post-purchase behavior," I realize how customers are influenced by emotions, experiences, and environment. This gave me the advice that design should not only be about performance but also attributes such as brand image, reliability, and usability.

4. Benefits of integrated marketing communication (IMC)
 By examples of companies such as Apple broadcasting their brand message across all means consistently (social media, websites, video, PR, etc.), I realized that converged communication leads to customer trust. In the future, I think it is vital to be keen on visual and linguistic consistency when communicating technology.

5. Measuring Marketing With ROI and Dashboards
 The idea of marketing results being quantified and improvement cycles being carried out seems familiar to the engineering thinking I'm accustomed to, and it resonated with me. In particular, measuring by ROI and metrics is a powerful way of thinking in product development as well, and I think it brings business thinking and engineering together.