Marketing Management & Marketing Plan

IT is inability to market effectively cements its cost center role in the enterprise: communicating status but not value, fulfilling requests but not solving problems, and partially deploying technologies but not delivering expected results. IT organizations need to embrace the concepts, terminology, and process of marketing - creating marketing plans, executing campaigns, and boosting brand equity. The result will be delivery of the right projects for the right audience, accelerated time to benefit, and increased trust of the IT organization. The firms that embrace the marketing of IT first will be those with customer-facing technology, shared services, and strong process discipline. Marketing, the process by which a product or service originates and is then priced, promoted, and distributed to consumers. In large corporations the principal marketing functions precede the manufacture of a product. They involve market research and product development, design, and testing. Marketing concentrates primarily on the buyers, or consumers. After determining the customers’ needs and desires, marketers develop strategies that are designed to educate customers about a product’s most important features, persuade them to buy it, and then to enhance their satisfaction with the purchase. Where marketing once stopped with the sale, today businesses believe that it is more profitable to sell to existing customers than to new ones. As a result, marketing now also involves finding ways to turn one-time purchasers into lifelong customers. Marketing includes planning, organizing, directing, and controlling the decision-making regarding product lines, pricing, promotion, and servicing. In most of these areas marketing has overall authority; in others, as in product-line development, its function is primarily advisory. In addition, the marketing department of a business firm is responsible for the physical distribution of the products, determining the channels of distribution that will be used, and supervising the profitable flow of goods from the factory or warehouse. In order to promote the use of IT products and services, libraries must develop marketing plans to market its services. The marketing plan should include the following services: