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Marketing management is the process of developing strategies and planning for product or services, advertising, promotions, sales to reach desired customer segment.

Marketing management employs tools from economics and competitive strategy to analyze the industry context in which the firm operates. These include Porter's five forces, analysis of strategic groups of competitors, value chain analysis and others.[1]

In competitor analysis, marketers build detailed profiles of each competitor in the market, focusing on their relative competitive strengths and weaknesses using SWOT analysis. Marketing managers will examine each competitor's cost structure, sources of profits, resources and competencies, competitive positioning and product differentiation, degree of vertical integration, historical responses to industry developments, and other factors.

Marketing management often conduct market research and marketing research to perform marketing analysis. Marketers employ a variety of techniques to conduct market research, but some of the more common include:

• Qualitative marketing research, such as focus groups and various types of interviews
• Quantitative marketing research, such as statistical surveys
• Experimental techniques such as test markets
• Observational techniques such as ethnographic (on-site) observation

Marketing managers may also design and oversee various environmental scanning and competitive intelligence processes to help identify trends and inform the company's marketing analysis.

A brand audit is a thorough examination of a brand's current position in an industry compared to its competitors and the examination of its effectiveness. When it comes to brand auditing, six questions should be carefully examined and assessed:

1. how well the business’ current brand strategy is working,
2. what the company's established resource strengths and weaknesses are,
3. what its external opportunities and threats are,
4. how competitive the business’ prices and costs are,
5. how strong the business’ competitive position in comparison to its competitors is, and
6. what strategic issues are facing the business.

When a business is conducting a brand audit, the goal is to uncover business’ resource strengths, deficiencies, best market opportunities, outside threats, future profitability, and its competitive standing in comparison to existing competitors. A brand audit establishes the strategic elements needed to improve brand position and competitive capabilities within the industry. Once a brand is audited, any business that ends up with a strong financial performance and market position is more likely than not to have a properly conceived and effectively executed brand strategy.

A brand audit examines whether a business’ share of the market is increasing, decreasing, or stable. It determines if the company's margin of profit is improving, decreasing, and how much it is in comparison to the profit margin of established competitors. Additionally, a brand audit investigates trends in a business’ net profits, the return on existing investments, and its established economic value. It determines whether or not the business’ entire financial strength and credit rating is improving or getting worse. This kind of audit also assesses a business’ image and reputation with its customers. Furthermore, a brand audit seeks to determine whether or not a business is perceived as an industry leader in technology, offering product or service innovations, along with exceptional customer service, among other relevant issues that customers use to decide on a brand of preference.

A brand audit usually focuses on a business’ strengths and resource capabilities because these are the elements that enhance its competitiveness. A business’ competitive strengths can exist in several forms. Some of these forms include skilled or pertinent expertise, valuable physical assets, valuable human assets, valuable organizational assets, valuable intangible assets, competitive capabilities, achievements and attributes that position the business into a competitive advantage, and alliances or cooperative ventures.

The basic concept of a brand audit is to determine whether a business’ resource strengths are competitive assets or competitive liabilities. This type of audit seeks to ensure that a business maintains a distinctive competence that allows it to build and reinforce its competitive advantage. What's more, a successful brand audit seeks to establish what a business capitalizes on best, its level of expertise, resource strengths, and strongest competitive capabilities, while aiming to identify a business’ position and future performance.

Two customer segments are often selected as targets because they score highly on two dimensions:

1. The segment is attractive to serve because it is large, growing, makes frequent purchases, is not price sensitive (i.e. is willing to pay high prices), or other factors; and
2. The company has the resources and capabilities to compete for the segment's business, can meet their needs better than the competition, and can do so profitably.

A commonly cited definition of marketing is simply "meeting needs profitably".

The implication of selecting target segments is that the business will subsequently allocate more resources to acquire and retain customers in the target segment(s) than it will for other, non-targeted customers. In some cases, the firm may go so far as to turn away customers who are not in its target segment.The doorman at a swanky nightclub, for example, may deny entry to unfashionably dressed individuals because the business has made a strategic decision to target the "high fashion" segment of nightclub patrons.

In conjunction with targeting decisions, marketing managers will identify the desired positioning they want the company, product, or brand to occupy in the target customer's mind. This positioning is often an encapsulation of a key benefit the company's product or service offers that is differentiated and superior to the benefits offered by competitive products.For example, Volvo has traditionally positioned its products in the automobile market in North America in order to be perceived as the leader in "safety", whereas BMW has traditionally positioned its brand to be perceived as the leader in "performance".

Ideally, a firm's positioning can be maintained over a long period of time because the company possesses, or can develop, some form of sustainable competitive advantage.The positioning should also be sufficiently relevant to the target segment such that it will drive the purchasing behavior of target customers. To sum up,the marketing branch of a company is to deal with the selling and popularity of its products among people and its customers, as the central and eventual goal of a company is customer satisfaction and the return of revenue.

Marketing management employs a variety of metrics to measure progress against objectives. It is the responsibility of marketing managers to ensure that the execution of marketing programs achieves the desired objectives and does so in a cost-efficient manner.

Marketing management therefore often makes use of various organizational control systems, such as sales forecasts, and sales force and reseller incentive programs, sales force management systems, and customer relationship management tools (CRM). Some software vendors have begun using the term marketing operations management or marketing resource management to describe systems that facilitate an integrated approach for controlling marketing resources. In some cases, these efforts may be linked to various supply chain management systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), material requirements planning (MRP), efficient consumer response (ECR), and inventory management systems.

A business school is a university-level institution that confers degrees in business administration or management. According to Kaplan business schools are "educational institutions that specialize in teaching courses and programs related to business and/or management". Such a school can also be known as school of management, school of business administration, or colloquially b-school or biz school. A business school teaches topics such as accounting, administration, strategy, economics, entrepreneurship, finance, human resource management, management science, management information systems, international business, logistics, marketing, organizational psychology, organizational behavior, public relations, research methods and real estate among others.

There are several forms of business schools, including a school of business, business administration, and management.

1. Most of the university business schools consist of faculties, colleges, or departments within the university, and predominantly teach business courses (e.g. Mannheim Business School).
2. In North America, a business school is often understood to be a university program that offers a graduate Master of Business Administration degrees and/or undergraduate bachelor's degrees (e.g. Harvard Business School).
3. In Europe and Asia, some universities teach predominantly business courses (e.g. Copenhagen Business School).
4. Privately owned business school which is not affiliated with any university (e.g. WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management).

Kaplan classifies business schools along four Corners:

1. Culture (Europe - US): Independent of their actual (physical) location, business schools can be classified according to whether they follow the European or the US model.
2. Compass (international/global – regional/local): Business schools can be classified along a continuum, with international/ global schools on one end and regional/ local schools on the other.
3. Capital (public – private): Business schools can either be publicly (state) funded or privately funded, for example through endowments or tuition fees.
4. Content (teaching – research): Business school can be classified according to whether a school considers teaching or research to be its primary focus.

Some business schools structure their teaching around the use of case studies (i.e. the case method). Case studies have been used in Graduate and Undergraduate business education for nearly one hundred years. Business cases are historical descriptions of actual business situations. Typically, information is presented about a business firm's products, markets, competition, financial structure, sales volumes, management, employees and other factors influencing the firm's success. The length of a business case study may range from two or three pages to 30 pages, or more.

Students are expected to scrutinize the case study and prepare to discuss strategies and tactics that the firm should employ in the future. Three different methods have been used in business case teaching:

1. Preparing case-specific questions to be answered by the student. This is used with short cases intended for Undergraduate students. The underlying concept is that such students need specific guidance to be able to analyze case studies.
2. Problem-solving analysis is the second method initiated by the Harvard Business School which is by far the most widely used method in MBA and executive development programs. The underlying concept is that with enough practice (hundreds of case analyses) students develop intuitive skills for analyzing and resolving complex business situations. Successful implementation of this method depends heavily on the skills of the discussion leader.
3. A generally applicable strategic planning approach. This third method does not require students to analyze hundreds of cases. A strategic planning model is provided and students are instructed to apply the steps of the model to six – and up to a dozen cases – during a semester. This is sufficient to develop their ability to analyze a complex situation, generate a variety of possible strategies and to select the best ones. In effect, students learn a generally applicable approach to analyze cases studies and real situations. This approach does not make any extraordinary demands on the artistic and dramatic talents of the teacher. Consequently, most professors are capable of supervising the application of this method.

In contrast to the case method some schools use a skills-based approach in teaching business. This approach emphasizes quantitative methods, in particular operations research, management information systems, statistics, organizational behavior, modeling and simulation, and decision science. The leading institution in this method is the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. The goal is to provide students a set of tools that will prepare them to tackle and solve problems.

In addition to teaching students, many business schools run Executive Education programs. These may be either open programs or company-specific programs. Executives may also acquire an MBA title in an Executive MBA program within university of business or from top ranked business schools. Many business schools seek close co-operation with business.

        School Description

business marketing

The Marketing and Sales major provides students with an understanding of the marketing process and its role in domestic and international business environments. Courses are design to develop student's abilities to plan, implement, and analyze marketing strategies and campaigns aimed at targeted buyer demographics.

Study for positions in:

• Marketing Support
• Direct Sales

School Description

Choose the education that's right for YOU!               

Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Phoenix, AZ ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	BS in Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Tucson, AZ ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: San Diego, CA ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	BS Business/Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: San Jose, CA ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	BS of Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Aurora, CO ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Colorado Springs, CO ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Clearwater, FL ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Jacksonville, FL ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Orlando, FL ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Plantation, FL ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Tampa, FL ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
MBA/MKT	Master of Business Administration- Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The MBA/Marketing concentration addresses an in-depth review of product and market segmentation, how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. Advertising and global marketing with requisite legal and cultural issues will be brought to the fore, as well as core accounting principles to analyze the impact of marketing dollars. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Hawaii, HI ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
CA/MK	Merchandising Management - Bachelor's Degree From The International Academy of Design and Technology Chicago
School: International Academy of Design & Technology Program: The Merchandising Management program offers students and working professionals the opportunity to compete in today's job market by combining theoretical elements with practical applications. Students graduating from this program will have skills such as assessing consumer buying trends, developing appropriate visual displays, and utilizing sales and business practices. Students are also given the opportunity to improve their understanding of and ability to make use of critical analysis and aesthetic principles. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Chicago, IL ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	BS Business/Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Troy, MI ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Santa Fe, NM ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	BS in Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Cleveland, OH ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
AA/BA	Business - Marketing
School: Pioneer Pacific College Program: The Marketing and Sales major provides students with an understanding of the marketing process and its role in domestic and international business environments. Courses are design to develop student's abilities to plan, implement, and analyze marketing strategies and campaigns aimed at targeted buyer demographics. Study for positions in: Marketing Support Direct Sales :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Portland, OR ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Tigard, OR ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Pittsburgh, PA ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
MBA/MKT	Master of Business Administration- Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The MBA/Marketing concentration addresses an in-depth review of product and market segmentation, how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. Advertising and global marketing with requisite legal and cultural issues will be brought to the fore, as well as core accounting principles to analyze the impact of marketing dollars. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Peurto Rico, PR ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Bachelor of Science in Business/Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Puerto Rico, PR ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Salt Lake City, UT ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Seattle, WA ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Business Marketing
School: University of Phoenix Program: The marketing major addresses how to identify customer needs, how to communicate information about products and services to customers and potential customers, where to market and how to price products and services, and how to respond to growing demands to markets in different countries and cultures. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Campus    ::  Location: Brookfield, WI ::  more info

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Code	Concentration	More Info
BA/MK	Bachelor of Science in Business/Marketing From University of Phoenix
School: University of Phoenix Program: The goal of the Marketing major is to equip you with the necessary skills to successfully manage the marketing functions of an organization. This includes the development of creative, analytical, and leadership abilities. :: Concentration: Marketing :: Online    ::  Location: Online, ::  more info

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