Myth 1: Marketing concept
[Symptoms]: Enterprises caught in this misunderstanding do not attach importance to marketing concepts, are not good at developing marketing concepts, do not strive to cultivate marketing concepts, do not actively guide marketing concepts, do not know how to update marketing concepts, and still cling to outdated product concepts, marketing concepts and sales concepts.
At present, the marketing competition in China is divided into three levels: the first level is the competition of marketing skills; The second level is marketing strategy planning; The third level is the development of marketing concept. 2 1 century, the competition of marketing ideas is the deepest and highest level of competition in enterprise marketing activities, the essence and core of enterprise marketing management activities, and the sharp weapon for China enterprises to participate in market competition, which determines the success or failure of enterprises to some extent.
[Prescription]: The huge gap between China enterprises and multinational enterprises in marketing management is mainly manifested in the gap in marketing concepts. The primary task of China enterprises is to make up this "short board". First, we should implement the concept management of enterprise employees, establish modern marketing concepts of customer-centered, competition-oriented, overall marketing and people-oriented through training and communication, instill the marketing concepts established by enterprises into employees' minds, and internalize the marketing concepts of enterprises into employees' behaviors and concreteness. Secondly, it is necessary to implement customer concept management, carefully study customer concepts and needs, scientifically position marketing concepts, and strive to convey marketing demands to customers through integrated image design and brand promotion, so as to achieve complex communication goals.
Myth 2: Blind belief experience
[Symptoms]: Enterprises caught in this misunderstanding can be roughly divided into three categories: First, the operators did not think carefully about "what kind of industry are we engaged in" from the perspective of the overall development of the market, so that the company's tasks were defined too narrowly, which limited the company's development; Second, enterprise managers are short-sighted and lack foresight in guiding ideology, and only consider the current short-term interests and fail to see the long-term development of enterprises; Third, some particularly successful companies, once successful, made them forget the coming failure, only saw themselves and knew nothing about the outside world or turned a blind eye, blindly believing that past successful experiences would still succeed.
Aiduo once occupied the second place in the national VCD market and was praised as the most successful home appliance brand in China. Its main product, VCD, is considered to be a technology and industry that is about to be eliminated and in transition. When the consumer demand changes, Aiduo still stays in the empty talk about how to plan new ideas and how to defeat opponents. More sadly, Edo has never made any strategic plan, but only relied on the passion of decision makers to fight, which led to its success and death.
[Prescription]: Constantly meeting the needs of consumers is the only way for enterprises to survive and develop today. This requires enterprises to adhere to the concept of marketing in business practice, so as to fundamentally overcome marketing myopia, avoid business mistakes, and enable enterprises to survive and develop for a long time. At present, there are still many enterprises, especially those with brand-name or "fist" products, attached to the high-quality brand-name products they have worked so hard to create, holding the old management model and sticking to the old ideas; Some enterprises seem to have introduced new business ideas in form, and slogans can be seen everywhere. However, in their business practice, they can't carry out new ideas well, and their behavior is still dominated by traditional ideas, which leads to short-sightedness in business marketing, which makes business in trouble and even leads to business failure. All these should arouse our great attention to avoid the emergence of market marketing myopia.
Myth 3: Strategic Management
[Symptoms]: Enterprises caught in this misunderstanding suffer from a kind of "short-sightedness" and "restlessness": they attach importance to tactics and neglect strategy; Pay attention to cleverness and ignore tactics; Pay more attention to the present and less attention to the long term. These enterprises either think that strategy is empty, long-term and useless, and only tactics and short-term interests are practical, effective and direct to enterprises; Or the top management and marketing manager are too busy to make marketing strategic planning.
In marketing management, the strategy is to "choose the right thing to do" and the tactic is to "do things right". The giants, Longfei, Chundu and Asia, which were once famous all over the country, all failed later. Their failure was not a tactical failure, but a strategic mistake.
[Prescription]: At present, China's marketing has entered the stage of marketing strategy competition, and the application of any marketing tactics must be based on marketing strategy. Marketing strategy includes market research, market segmentation, target market selection, market positioning and competitive strategy selection. Marketing strategy refers to product, price, distribution and promotion. Enterprises should correctly handle the relationship between marketing strategy and marketing sub-strategy and the specific behavior of marketers. Without the strategic planning of the marketing division, the strategic management of the marketing headquarters will be difficult to achieve the expected goals. Secondly, for marketers, although their marketing behavior is often short-term interest-oriented, if enterprises cannot encourage more marketers to establish long-term concepts and overall awareness, it will greatly damage the strategic value of enterprises.
Myth 4: Brand Management
[Symptoms]: There are two kinds of enterprises that fall into this misunderstanding: one is to sanctify and complicate the brand, and think that branding is something that big enterprises only consider, and that branding must have a very large investment, and small enterprises simply have no strength and do not need to be branded; The second is to blindly emphasize the promotion of sales volume and regard the sales volume of products as the biggest goal pursued by enterprises. It is believed that the sales volume is to be a brand. As long as the sales volume comes up, the brand will naturally improve.
[Prescription]: Another misunderstanding that enterprises in China need to overcome is that brand building is sales. In fact, to build a strong brand, one is to maintain the healthy growth of sales and market share, and the other is to pay attention to the promotion of brand image and the accumulation of brand assets. Looking at some powerful brands, they all pay attention to the growth of sales and market share, and pay more attention to the brand infrastructure-the promotion of brand image and the accumulation of brand assets. Coca-Cola and Haier have always wanted both immediate and long-term benefits; Not only sales, but also brand accumulation. Only such a brand can gallop the market and last forever. On the contrary, one-sided pursuit of sales volume will often lead to over-exploitation of the market by business personnel, which will bring great damage to brand reputation and brand loyalty.
Myth 5: Organizational Construction
[Proof]: Enterprises caught in this misunderstanding mistakenly believe that: First, the original sales organization with a single sales department (department) can also undertake the marketing management function well and complete the sales task, and there is no need to set up a separate marketing department; Second, the sales department is more important than the marketing department, which spends money to create benefits, so the role and status of the marketing department should be ranked below the sales department.
[Prescription]: Establishing a fully functional and efficient marketing organization is the premise and foundation to ensure the efficient operation of enterprise marketing management. It is of great practical significance to speed up the construction of enterprise marketing department, establish a scientific, reasonable and standardized market-oriented operation mechanism and reconstruct a brand-new enterprise technology, culture and organizational structure. This requires enterprises to fully understand the importance and urgency of the construction of marketing departments. Enterprises must speed up the liberation from the traditional sales model, carry out market-oriented operation at a high level, make the marketing work change from passive to active, from decentralized to systematic, from artificial to scientific, and must establish an operating organization-marketing department that is suitable for the market economy.
Myth 6: Channel construction
[Symptom]: Enterprises caught in this misunderstanding believe that under the special market environment of scattered channels and backward distribution system in China, "channels are king", and enterprises have everything if they have huge channels. These enterprises exaggerate the fact that the distribution system in China market is backward and imperfect, and the short-sighted and short-term behavior of dealers, especially in the case of the rapid rise of new retail formats such as supermarkets and hypermarkets. They think it is more effective to integrate a large number of short-sighted dealers. It is better to skip dealers, establish a huge overseas sales organization and sales team, shorten channels and directly operate terminals.
Sanjiu Pharmaceutical established Sanjiu Pharmaceutical Chain Company, and plans to spend 654.38+0.3 billion yuan to build 8,000 Sanjiu pharmacies within three years. TCL plans to transform its distribution network into a nationwide retail network within five years. China Petrochemical invested 25 1 100 million yuan to acquire more than 1 10,000 social gas stations; Master Kong has set up more than 200 business offices all over the country, and vigorously promoted the "three batches of direct sales" plan of retailers and retail outlets. This directly leads to the sharp rise of network operating expenses and marketing costs, the increase of marketing personnel, the difficulty of branch management, the reduction of distribution efficiency, and even the corruption of branches.
Haier has a marketing team of 20,000 people, Robust has more than 8,000 people, TCL has 7,000 people and Skyworth has more than 4,000 people. The huge sales team has become a heavy burden for enterprises. Calculated by 30,000 yuan per person per year, the channel cost of Skyworth Group alone is as high as 654.38+0.2 billion yuan per year. Lehua Color TV has set up 30 branches in China, with nearly 100 regional offices and thousands of salespeople. The annual channel operating expenses reach more than 200 million yuan, and the monthly operating expenses of a medium-sized branch are about 80,000 yuan. This marketing model of machine-sea tactics has become the burden of enterprises, and there is no profit at all.
[Prescription]: The household appliance industry in China, unable to bear the burden of self-built channels, started the reform plan of "slimming channels". Wan Jiale completely cancels its branches, all dealers directly face the factory headquarters, and the payment is sent directly to the headquarters; TCL marketing system laid off more than 4,000 people; Konka is reducing its marketing branches and merging a large number of branches. The channel reform of China's home appliance industry has given us such a revelation: an efficient distribution system is the key asset of an enterprise. Enterprises need to attach great importance to the construction of distribution channels strategically, and must do what they can, regardless of the actual situation and ability of enterprises, and integrate their own superior resources, social distribution system and dealer distribution system according to their own strength, scale and market characteristics to establish efficient distribution channels suitable for them.
Myth 7: Promotion Management
[Symptoms]: Enterprises caught in this misunderstanding have a one-sided understanding of promotion, and their understanding of the role and effect of promotion is insufficient or even wrong: First, their understanding of promotion is one-sided, thinking that promotion is sales with prizes or rebate sales; Second, it exaggerates the role of promotion and thinks that promotion is a panacea for all diseases, which makes the marketing department and sales staff suffer from serious "promotion dependence". Once the promotion stops, the sales volume will drop, and there will only be an indefinite year-round promotion; Third, there is no plan before the promotion activities, and follow the competitors, thinking that as long as they are more competitive than the competitors, they will win; Fourth, there is no overall budget for promotional activities, and management is out of control, which is a piecemeal problem. No matter how good the promotion activities are, they have also become the burden and negative effects of enterprises. These enterprises don't do every link in the process of marketing management in a down-to-earth manner, but bet all their bets on promotion. Simply relying on promotion means makes the promotion effect weakened, the promotion cost greatly lost, the product profit rate greatly reduced, and the product and brand image greatly damaged.
[Prescription]: Enterprises must have a correct and comprehensive understanding of sales promotion. First of all, promotion is an important link and content in the process of enterprise marketing activities, and it is also one of the elements of effective marketing mix of enterprises. Secondly, promotion is not everything. Essentially, it is a temporary and short-term stimulating activity, with the law that the effect decreases with time. A promotion that lasts for more than three months is equal to no promotion, which is essentially a signal to consumers to reduce prices in disguise; Promotion is usually non-cyclical, and the creativity, time and money invested in promotion activities cannot be reused, otherwise it will give consumers a feeling of being uncreative and unattractive; More importantly, for the products of the same brand, we should not hold promotional activities too frequently, otherwise, consumers will think that they are slow-moving products, inventory products or inferior and cheap products of the manufacturers, which will greatly damage the brand image.
Myth 8: product development
[Symptoms]: Enterprises caught in this misunderstanding think that the higher the product quality and the more selling points, the greater the possibility of marketing success; Otherwise, the products will not be competitive in the market, and there will be no market. On the one hand, it makes enterprises increase investment in product research and development, and the cost of products keeps rising; On the other hand, product research and development is out of touch with the market, regardless of the actual needs of consumers, but in order to pursue more selling points and add functions that consumers do not need at all. This is the common fault that many enterprises, marketers and advertisers are most likely to make.
[Prescription]: According to the changes of consumer demand, it is the requirement for enterprises to participate in market competition to continuously introduce products with high quality and low price. Enterprises must avoid falling into the misunderstanding of excessive pursuit of perfect quality, because consumers in any market and at any time want good quality and reasonable price, not products with excellent quality but high price. It can be seen that it is not necessarily the best policy to increase investment and make the quality perfect. Enterprises need to find the best balance between the actual needs of customers and the existing resources, production capacity and the cost of maintaining quality standards. Secondly, enterprises must also avoid falling into the misunderstanding of focusing too many selling points on one product, because today, with the proliferation of media and information, consumers are besieged by countless advertising information every day, and only simple and clear information that meets their own interests and needs can enter consumers' sight and brain. Therefore, the selling point of the product and the corresponding appeal must be highly concentrated. Only by focusing on the limited selling points with the most differences and advantages, aiming at specific target consumer groups in a relatively small market space, and carrying out centralized, powerful and efficient appeal and information communication on the selling points of products, can we seize the "ladder" in consumers' minds and occupy the market share of products.
Myth 9: Process Management
[Symptoms]: Business owners caught in this misunderstanding often say to salespeople, "I don't care how you sell them, I only look at Arabic numerals, as long as they sell them.". This is a typical "results-oriented" marketing management model of "only looking at the results, not the process". The opaque marketing process, behind-the-scenes operation of business personnel and excessive short-term behavior lead to a series of problems: there is no way to find out the problems in the product sales process in time and solve them in time; In terms of sales channels, the price system is chaotic and the phenomenon of vicious commodity smuggling is repeatedly banned; Dealers' profits drop, their enthusiasm is not high, and their loyalty to enterprises drops; Accounts receivable remain high, and dormant account locks in enterprises; The salesman's action is unplanned, the performance is not assessed, and the sales plan fails; The opaque sales process leads to an increase in business risks; The salesman's work efficiency is low and the sales cost is high; The construction of salesman team is weak, and the marketing cost rises.
[Prescription]: Establishing a scientific marketing process management system and a strict and sound multi-objective marketing assessment system are the key links to promote the sustained and healthy development of enterprise market development and marketing management. Therefore, it is urgent for enterprises in China to build a scientific marketing process management system, focusing on the process management of marketers, markets and dealers, so as to achieve "everything for every marketer every day", "what price does every product flow to what market" and "daily shipment, repayment amount and promotion work for every dealer", and comprehensively improve the quality management level of the whole marketing process. Secondly, enterprises need to establish a multi-objective marketing assessment system for business personnel, break the previous index assessment system of single assessment of sales volume and return amount, and establish a multi-objective assessment system that pays equal attention to quantity and quality and aims at improving enterprise performance. Formulate indicators such as sales volume, payment recovery rate, payment recovery period, sales growth rate, market spread rate, cost profit rate, new market development rate, strategic new product sales, new customer growth rate, consumer satisfaction, sales expense rate, product display, market maintenance and development ability and enthusiasm. , so as to fully mobilize the enthusiasm of all business personnel, give play to their intelligence, and let them really participate in various management tokens of enterprise marketing activities as masters.
Myth 10: Price War
[Symptom]: Enterprises caught in this misunderstanding believe that it is difficult for enterprises to stay out of the price war under the special market environment in China, even enterprises with very high strength in the same industry can hardly stay out of it. When competitors set off a price war, they had no choice but to cut prices. Only when they dropped sharply and were much more than their competitors, could they finally win in the desperate fight. Otherwise, there will be the danger of being squeezed out of the market, or even going bankrupt at a loss.
[Prescription]: Price war is not inevitable. In fact, you can completely avoid falling into the "quagmire" of price wars. The following strategies can be adopted: First, avoid shifting the focus of competition from product benefit to price, prevent destructive competition and encourage constructive competition. At the same time, it urges customers to turn their attention to the differences between the advantages and disadvantages of products, rather than taking the initiative to quickly seize market share from one or two major competitors. The second is to avoid any misunderstanding about the competitive situation and market development. Only by investing manpower, material resources and financial resources can enterprises understand the hidden price causes behind competitors' prices and the comparability between prices. You can't simply take the price reduction as a counterattack based on one or two competitive quotations. Third, even if you want to fight back against your competitors, you should try to use other means besides price. For example, increase product value, speed up product innovation, improve service level, shorten the time from ordering to delivery, and make customers feel that it is reasonable for you to maintain a higher price. Fourth, make efforts to publicize and shape the image of high quality and good price of products, and send a message to consumers, that is, "if competitors keep reducing prices, they will definitely be better than their competitors in quality." The fifth is to find places that industry leaders can't notice. It may be marginal products, marginal market segments or even marginal sales channels, because it is too specialized, too small or dismissive of large enterprises.