:: Marketing Management
In the United States, a certificate may be offered by an institute of higher education. These certificates usually signify that a student has reached a standard of knowledge about a certain vocational or professional subject. Certificate programs can be completed more quickly than associate degrees and often do not have general education requirements. Undergraduate certificates represent completion of a specific program offered in coordination with a bachelors degree. Graduate certificates represent completion of studies beyond the bachelor's degree, yet short of a masters degree.
In the State of Maryland, a Certificate of Merit was, until recently, issued to graduating high-school seniors who met certain academic requirements (such as completion of advanced courses and a cumulative GPA of 3.00); the statewide certificate has since been replaced by "endorsements" defined by each local school system.[3]
It also may be awarded as a necessary certification to validate that a student is considered competent in a certain specific networking skill area in information technology. Thus a computer engineer or computer science graduation most likely will have to obtain additional certificates on and pertaining to the specific technologies or equipment used by the hiring corporation; if not, such employer may suffer unwanted penalties like foregoing (voiding the contract) the protections of a certain level of customer service or warranties.
A certification is a third-party attestation of an individual's level of knowledge or proficiency in a certain industry or profession. They are granted by authorities in the field, such as professional societies and universities, or by private certificate-granting agencies. Most certifications are time-limited; some expire after a period of time (e.g., the lifetime of a product that required certification for use), while others can be renewed indefinitely as long as certain requirements are met. Renewal usually requires ongoing education to remain up-to-date on advancements in the field, evidenced by earning the specified number of continuing education credits (CECs), or continuing education units (CEUs), from approved professional development courses.
Many certification programs are affiliated with professional associations, trade organizations, or private vendors interested in raising industry standards. Certificate programs are often created or endorsed by professional associations, but are typically completely independent from membership organizations. Certifications are very common in fields such as aviation, construction, technology, environment, and other industrial sectors, as well as healthcare, business, real estate, and finance.
According to The Guide to National Professional Certification Programs (1997) by Phillip Barnhart, "certifications are portable, since they do not depend on one company's definition of a certain job" and they provide protential employers with "an impartial, third-party endorsement of an individual's professional knowledge and experience".[1]
Certification is different from professional licensure. In the United States, licenses are typically issued by state agencies, whereas certifications are usually awarded by professional societies or educational institutes. Obtaining a certificate is voluntary in some fields, but in others, certification from a government-accredited agency may be legally required to perform certain jobs or tasks. In other countries, licenses are typically granted by professional societies or universities and require a certificate after about three to five years and so on thereafter. The assessment process for certification may be more comprehensive than that of licensure, though sometimes the assessment process is very similar or even the same, despite differing in terms of legal status.
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) defines the standard for being a certifying agency as meeting the following two requirements:
- Delivering an assessment based on industry knowledge that is independent from training courses or course providers
- Granting a time-limited credential to anyone who meets the assessment standards
The Institute for Credentialing Excellence (ICE) is a U.S.-based organization that sets standards for the accreditation of personnel certification and certificate programs based on the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, a joint publication of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). Many members of the Association of Test Publishers (ATP) are also certification organizations.
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:
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:
- how well the business’ current brand strategy is working,
- what the company's established resource strengths and weaknesses are,
- what its external opportunities and threats are,
- how competitive the business’ prices and costs are,
- how strong the business’ competitive position in comparison to its competitors is, and
- 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:
- 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
- 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.
School Description
Choose the education that's right for YOU!
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Merchandising Management - Bachelor's Degree From The
International Academy of Design and Technology Chicago |
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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.
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Concentration: Marketing |
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Campus |
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School Description
marketing management
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.
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