Marketing Management
Marketing questions test the marketing mix, marketing versus selling, and product decisions such as branding, labelling and packaging.
Marketing mix
- Product: quality, features, brand, packaging, after-sales service.
- Price: cost, competition, demand; skimming versus penetration.
- Place: channels such as zero level (direct), one level (retailer), two levels (wholesaler and retailer).
- Promotion: advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, publicity. Marketing is customer-oriented and starts before production; selling is product-oriented and follows production.
Product decisions
Branding gives identity, labelling gives information and legal compliance, packaging protects and promotes. Product life cycle stages are introduction, growth, maturity and decline, each needing a different strategy.
Worked example
A company launches a premium smartphone at ₹80,000 to recover research costs from early adopters, then lowers the price after six months. This is price skimming. Launching instead at ₹25,000 to capture mass share quickly would be penetration pricing. Reasoning: skimming suits innovative products with inelastic early demand; penetration suits price-sensitive, competitive markets.
Traps
- Equating marketing with selling or advertising.
- Mixing place (distribution) with promotion.
- Treating labelling and branding as the same thing.
- Forgetting that the four Ps are controllable variables.