Assessment Event 2 – Business Report

Introduction 

The business report highlights the marketing trends on the horizon specified in week 1. The process of market is differentiated by four different elements marketing control, marketing analysis, marketing implementation and marketing planning in the essay. Different aspects of marketing will be discussed to understand the core of the process in the context to HUL. Corporate responsibility along with the performance of the business and consumer behaviour with segmentation is the different approach which will be the key point in the Essay. Lastly positioning and targeting the markets will complete the essay with a short conclusion.

The marketing process 

Marketing trends usually deal with the different processes which influences the deals and the concepts of political issues. Mainly five different types of strategic analysis are carried to understand the necessity of it (Kanten and Darma 2017). However, 4 P’s analysis helps to analyze the different aspects of marketing theory. It is obvious to know that larger markets have larger expansion towards. Companies communicate with different aspects in recognizing the theories to perceive different images of the customer desire. Marketing Trends according to week 1 focuses on the different terms like artificial intelligence, machine learning, trends block chains marketing, corporate finance and data protection. The title of this particular week one discusses the areas which emerged through market influence from the year 2019. The trends are followed by the stakeholders in a concerned way so data protection and impact on demonstrating the financial outcomes is becoming a challenging job in the global market.

Figure 1: Marketing Process

Source: (Kanten and Darma 2017)

Marketing ethics or corporate social responsibility 

Marketing ethics refers to the standards and guidelines by which the excellence of human behaviour in organizations can be achieved. Business Ethics evaluates the moral quality of actions in business organizations because these actions come with consequences (Hodgkins et al. 2019). HUL believes that moral agents, business organizations are required to be “responsible” for those actions. These social responsibilities cut across all stakeholders in the company’s growth - shareholders, creditors, employees, customers, the environment and society. The firm must realize that it possesses these responsibilities because it is a conversable agent, i.e., it is capable of taking actions, and faces the social burden of expectation to bear the consequences of those actions. All ethics and social responsibilities are only applied to maximize return to shareholders. Maximum profits are totally incompatible with ethics and social responsibility. Business forecasting helps to gauge the future economic conditions by using past and present information.

Marketing as a contributor to business performance 

There are so many creative minds out there. People think it is easy to make an advertisement, just mention the product that is it, but it is not as simple as we think (Maziriri and Chinomona 2016). A lot of factors matter while making a great advertisement, right from timing, witty comebacks, using the present scenario to their advantage and what not. It can be better expressed as-

Place- The question is here where you want to launch the product according to the economic conditions of the place.

Price-Now the question is what is the price of your Product and Service must be your manufacturing cost plus your profit. But how much profit is good as similar products are also offered by same quality, inferior quality or good quality with different price options according to the quality of the product. Now a day’s competition is a keyword. The price has to be competitive so that one can make profit after covering up the expenses.

Promotion- It is the method applied by direct marketing of your product, by giving advertisement in radio and television or through web portal.

HUK believes that marketing is crucial in this competitive market to thrive in. No business can become big without marketing in this era (Maziriri and Chinomona 2016). For many, marketing means only a little bit of ad here and there. But marketing is not only limited to few of the known traditional marketing ideas. Marketing is really fun and useful if one just knows how to do it.

The marketing environment 

The environment of the marketing includes the external and internal factors like customers, retailers, employees, shareholders and distributors. Social, political, technological, legal and economic factors come under external factors. However, some of them are controllable and some of them are not (Mandal 2020). The organisation like HUL should be aware of the marketing environment and operations required in the business to overcome the issues through marketing activities. Mainly marketing environment may be divided into three different parts macro-environment, microenvironment and internal environment

Figure 2:  Types of marketing environment

Source: (Mandal 2020)

Market research 

Market research is a systematic and in-depth analysis of the market i.e. target group or company by gathering, assessing and interpreting information. The data gathered through market research helps the business organizations to make quality and informed decisions for their business (Ind et al. 2017). The main objective of any business is to deliver better services to customers to generate better revenue. Market research is a key factor that has the potential to boost businesses. Following are the purposes of market research that will help to better understand its importance. Market research identifies the gap in the market where your business can excel. Specific information can be collected through primary research though it can be more time consuming and expensive to conduct than secondary research.

Quantitative Research: This consists of a collection of analytical data to analyse and observe market trends (Ind et al. 2017). This data is usually collected through Surveys, Mail, Online Analytics, offline interactions, etc

Qualitative Research: Instead of a specific set of questions, it consists of a research topic and a discussion conductor to make sure the required research data is captured through accurate market research questions put forth. This consists of focus groups, in-depth interviews, and observations.

Consumer behaviour

This consists of an analysis of data which has been previously been compiled and captured. It consists of valuable information that may not be directly captured from the consumer. The research data usually consists of information from public sources, commercial sources, government agencies, trade associations etc. For example the organisation HUL collect data from various sources and compared based on the specific set of questions that have been answered by a large number of respondents. The behaviour helps to gather analytical data to understand the product market and every little aspect of it such as market size, the buying and consumption patterns and most importantly the pain points of the consumer products/service resolve (Kanten and Darma 2017). This analytical data then further helps in developing product marketing and targeting strategy that helps connect your product/service and the consumers.

Market segmentation 

Identification of the opportunities will help the business to grab the chance to expand the business. Market opportunity gives the business a chance to expand to deliver more services. The competitor analysis is crucial for any business to stand out in the market. The analysis identifies threats posed by competitors that the business might face in the future and also provide your business with an opportunity to add value to your services where competitors are lacking (Sheikh et al. 2016). Market segmentation is essentially the process of separating a large group (or market) into smaller groups, based on common traits and characteristics such as age, income, location, likes and dislikes etc. The biggest example is HUL, as how the organisation has segmented the entire market as per the types of the customers as per their necessities. There are a number of ways that brands and marketers typically carry out market segmentation. They gather data, this could be digital data or simply data collected via interviews or surveyed. 

Figure 3: Types of segmentation

Source: (Sheikh et al. 2016)

Target markets 

Target market is identified even before any of the product or service comes out to the market. Four levels in target markets are demographic psychographic geographic and behavioural. It refers to the place where potential customers are present to whom the organisation sells its services and products (Nguyen et al. 2018). At the same time, some specific customers are also directly benefited through the target market. It is a strategy followed by HUL, which breaks a huge market into a smaller one so that one can concentrate on a small group of customers. Dividing the target market into several groups can simply be defined as the groups which can be divided from a large population. This includes education, gender, age etc.

Positioning 

Positioning is a place where a company occupies the mindset of their customers. They distinguish the products according to the competitors, products or brands. To position in a company, the size of the feature which represents their brand is the fundamental role. One of the powerful concepts of marketing is positioning (Yang et al. 2017). It helps to build the reputation of the product and to compete with the global market with the competitor. Today positioning has become an activity and strategy through which markets are modifying slightly to enter foreign markets.

Figure 4:  Elements in positioning

Source: (Yang et al. 2017)

Conclusion 

The report which discusses different approaches to marketing trends in the study signifies the importance of different instruments used in the strategy of marketing in the context to HUL. Everyone has different needs and trying to satisfy everyone’s or every segment’s needs is not feasible for most of the company. Identifying the strong and weak suits of the company and focusing on the segment that they can generate more income can boost everything in a company setting. However, it is helpful for the reader to understand marketing trends clearly after going through this report carefully.