Marketing mix stimuli (including products, brands, advertisements, Essay

Marketing mix stimuli (including products, brands, advertisements, packaging, point-of-purchase display) are designed and manage - Essay Example In marketing a product, a marketer will always have to look at the four Ps of marketing and make sure that all the four Ps have been well considered and addressed. The four Ps Product The seller must look at the product and make sure it meets consumers’ needs. The product is the centre of the marketing strategy because it is the eventual interest f he customer. According to Belohlavek (2008, p. 15), the product is extremely influential in the marketing mix because it is the ultimate way in which the firm will deliver value and worth to the consumer. Produce development should therefore be the first point at which the marketing mix begins because the customers can only be willing to buy products that they think or know provide them with the value for their money. Price Every product has its price at which it is delivered to consumers. In this regard, the price of the product is an extremely beneficial aspect of marketing because it affects consumer behavior and decisions. It is itself affected by so many other factors such as culture, consumer attitudes and economic factors. Pricing is hugely valuable because the right pricing can give the firm a long term success while the wrong pricing strategy ca lead to the firm dying from the market. Place This refers to the availability of the product. Having the right product will not help the firm unless and until the brand is in the convenient place at the proper timing. Place plays a particularly significant role in the way the brand and its producer will be successful in the market place. It is therefore, every necessary to ensure that the brand is available to the target market to make sure users can conveniently access the product every time they need it. This increases the sales of the product as well as improving the user awareness of the product thus making it endeared to the consumers. Promotion To boost sales and deal with competition, promotion of the product becomes exceedingly prominent and makings su re has visibility is hugely crucial. There are a number of ways that any marketer or any firm scan use to expand the market. Promotion is communication with the potential and existing customers to enlighten them about the brand and its advanatages. One can use all of the possible methods such as internet, mass media, print media and any other available channel to communicate with consumers. Case: Apple and iPhone One of the firms that have been able to take care of the marketing mix is the American technology firm, Apple Inc. Apple Inc. produces a number of technology product from cell phones, table computes, laptop computers, desktop computers and including consumer software. However, for the purposes of this paper, the iPhone will be the only product considered. However, Apple has been able to apply the marketing mix for all its products and thus creating a tremendous success for its products. Product With regard to its product, Apple Inc. has been able to understand its industry in an exceptionally clear way so as to deliver a product that resonates with the needs of the consumers. Instead of being reactive to the market conditions, Apple Inc. is one of the fewest firms in the world that decided to be proactive in the way it meets consumers’ needs. It always delivers a product that is ahead of other firms in the same industry. This has enabled the

The influence and effects of JSR-170 on the Content Management Essay

The influence and effects of JSR-170 on the Content Management Industry - Essay Example For example business departments turning content into assets, that thus becomes a monetary value for the enterprise. The ECM market is rapidly growing. Regan (2005) quotes a Gartner study that estimates the value of ECM software at $2.5 billion by end of 2006 while Forrester are predicting 19% growth per annum to reach a value of $4 billion by 2008. The ECM market is predicted to rapidly grow in the next few years and will in all likelihood outstrip the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market (Dschner et al, 2005). The content is currently locked in proprietary repositories or databases that only allow access with custom APIs. Attempting to have an application that can access information from different repositories is expensive since the application has to implement all the different combinations of repository APIs. As a consequence information that should be integrated remains isolated. This leads to vendor lock-in because the costs of changing a CM-vendor are high. The need for content access standards is obvious yet the content management industry has struggled to solve this problem. "[T]he ECM pure-play and infrastructure vendors are currently pushing their proprietary content repositories, hoping to grab as much market share as possible from rivals" (McNabb and Moore, 2005). Developing custom applications and services on top of a single vendor's proprietary API is an enterprise investment risk. Over time it is possible to lose the investment when the vendor goes out of business. That risk can be mitigated (but not entirely eliminated) through open standards, methodologies or documentation. The Java Specification Requests (JSRs) are documents within the Java Community Process (JCP) for defining new standards for the Java language. JSR-170, whose final version was released on June 17 2005, is expected to solve the above mentioned problem. It offers a standard, vendor-independent API to access data from a content repository and allows the required data flexibility that is needed for ECM to support additional business processes or applications. The concept of JSR-170 is explained in one sentence: "[JSR-170] specifies a standard API to access content repositories in Java 2 independently of implementation" (Nscheler, 2005) A proposed standard can only emerge to a standard if it is widely accepted and supported by the vendors and requested by clients of content management systems. The obvious problem is that while the standard is new not all vendors will have it implemented. This is akin to solving the proverbial problem of what comes first the chicken or the egg. With the standard not implemented the critical mass of customers demanding the implementation of the standard will not be easily achieved. The clients must first be aware of the new