Marketing : Business Promotion - Some Thoughts and a Few Case Studies

Abstract

The business is increasingly likely to be a network of strategic partnerships among designers, technology providers, manufacturers, distributors and information specialists. The business will be defined by its customers, not by its products or factories or offices. Further, Marketing can no longer be the sole responsibilities of a few specialists. Rather, everyone in the organisation may be charged with responsibility for understanding customers and contributing to developing and deliver value for them. The organisations that are unable to achieve this focus on customer will either disappear or become highly specialised players, taking strategic direction from the customers. At the corporate and business unit levels, marketing may merge with strategic R & D planning or, more generally, the strategy development function, with shared responsibility for information management, environmental scanning and co-ordination of the network activities. In the present paper, some of the above thoughts have been examined and evaluated considering the existing form of promotional practices exhibited by a few selected R & D laboratories.