It is important to understand what marketing is and how it can be integrated into your business, in order to improve its competitive advantage. With busy, fast paced lives, professionals often find that they don't have time to get to grips with the basics. "Develop Your Marketing Skills" is a user-friendly guide appropriate for business people for whom implementation is the key issue. It outlines the key concepts and principles which govern the subject of marketing, such as product management, market research, communications, market coverage, creating a marketing plan and pricing perspectives.It also gives key insights into how theories and tools work in actual business scenarios, shows you how to improve customer satisfaction and highlights contemporary issues, such as sustainability. There are summary pages at the end of each chapter containing questions and suggested activities, helping you to revise the basics and increase your confidence. With many of the issues discussed being at the cutting edge of marketing research and practice, "Develop Your Marketing Skills" is a must for anybody wishing to enter the marketing profession, develop their current knowledge further or indeed run their own business.
Introduction 1
1 Marketing: separating fact from fiction 3
2 The marketing environment 15
3 Customers in all their glory 26
4 Using research to make informed decisions 37
5 Product management 49
6 Right time, right place, right quantity, right condition 75
7 You paid how much? 85
8 How communication works 95
9 Services marketing vs marketing services 111
10 How to create a marketing plan 122
11 Sustainable marketing in the 21st century 135
12 Questions answered 146