Posted on : 2023-04-27 20:03:47
Article : Good evening, Friday management TASK 239- Marketing is the task of arranging need-satisfying and profitable offers to target buyers. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to create additional incentives and pressures at the right times and in the right amounts for noncustomers.
Marketing is the task of arranging need-satisfying and profitable offers to target buyers. Sometimes, it is necessary to create additional incentives and pressures at the right times and in the right amounts for noncustomers. In between, Mega marketing is the strategically coordinated application of economic, psychological, political, and public relations skill to gain the cooperation of a number of parties in order to enter and/or operate in a given market. Its challenges are found in both domestic and international situations. Mega marketing thus takes an enlarged view of the skills and resources needed to enter and operate in certain markets. Markets characterized by high entry barriers can be called blocked or protected markets. To penetrate into such markets in addition to the four Ps of marketing strategy—product, price, place, and promotion—executives must add two more—power and public relations. Such strategic thinking can be called as Mega marketing.
As markets mature, they acquire a fixed set of suppliers, competitors, distributors, and customers. These players develop a vested interest in preserving the market’s closed system and seek to protect it against intruders. They are often supported by government regulatory agencies, labor unions, banks, and other institutions. They may erect visible and invisible barriers to entry: taxes, tariffs, quotas, and compliance requirements. As per certain Japan’s regulations sometimes besides facing high tariffs, foreign companies encounter difficulty in signing up good Japanese distributors and dealers, even when the non-Japanese companies offer superior products and better margins. Motorola, for example, fought for years to sell its telecommunications equipment in Japan. It succeeded only by influencing Washington to apply pressure on Japan and by redesigning its equipment to comply with Japan’s tough and sometimes arbitrary standards.
Companies that have trouble breaking into new markets aren’t always victims of blocked markets. The problem may be inferior products, overpricing, financing difficulties, unwillingness to pay taxes or tariffs that other companies pay, or protection of the market by a legitimate patent. The barriers may include discriminatory legal requirements, political favouritism, cartel agreements, social or cultural biases, unfriendly distribution channels, and refusals to cooperate. These create the challenge that mega marketing has to overcome. How can companies break into blocked markets? There is usually an easy way and a hard way. The easy way is to offer many concessions, thus making it almost unprofitable to enter the market. The hard way is to formulate a strategy for entry, a task calling for skills never acquired by most marketers through normal training and experience. Marketers are trained primarily in the use of the four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. They know how to create a cost-effective marketing mix that appeals to customers and end users. But customers and end users are not always the main problem. When a huge gate blocks the company’s path into the market, it needs to blast the gate open or at least find the key so that its goods can be offered to potential customers. Moreover, the strategic marketing effort does not end with successful entry into the protected market. The company must know how to stay in as well as break in.
Japanese companies have coped with blocked markets in ingenious ways. India, for example, banned the import of luxury consumer electronics products in a drive to conserve its foreign hard currency and protect its fledgling home consumer electronics industry. Yet Japanese companies like Sony, Panasonic, and Toshiba have taken steps to pry open the Indian market, however slightly, to its brands of televisions, videocassette recorders, and stereos.
Although many Japanese consumer electronics products are not officially available in India, several Japanese companies advertise their products in Indian newspapers and magazines in order to build preference for them should they become available at a later date. In the meantime, this advertising influences the selection of Japanese products by Indian tourists in Sri Lanka, Singapore, and other free markets as well as by Indian workers laboring in other countries. Furthermore, some Japanese products enter the Indian market unofficially and are immediately purchased by consumers.
In addition, the Japanese government supports Japanese companies by lobbying the Indian government for a relaxation of the ban or for its transformation into quotas or normal tariffs. In return, Japan offers to buy more Indian goods and services. Thus, although Japanese businesses cannot export certain products to India, they have pursued mega-marketing actions on several fronts to gain access to this vast and fertile market.
Share your career experiences with product examples in mega marketing strategies application so that marketing readers and entrepreneurs might use to try out possible mega marketing strategies in their businesses. We would further discuss this topic with more examples on our Management Solution for TASK 239 on 1st May 2023.
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