Excellent marketing means actively listening to customers and constantly refining a firm’s product offering. It is not a coincidence that the most successful companies in the world look for patterns in customer behavior and create products that satisfy their needs. Businesses become truly profitable when they build a loyal fanbase.

This section of the Marketing Strategy course focuses on customer behavior and the psychology behind buying decisions. It is crucial to understand how customers act so we can determine what product they need. Once we have a good grasp of our customers’ needs, wants, and desires, we can choose our target group. These are key steps of the marketing strategy building process.

The four Ps of a marketing mix are product, price, place, and promotion. Combined, they make for an effective product launch. The role of marketing managers is to tailor them to the target market they have chosen to pursue.

This section of the Marketing Strategy course goes into more detail about product decisions. Goods and services that cover people’s basic needs are simply not enough. Customers want to become clients of firms that offer a complete product concept. That is why marketers need to emphasize a product’s benefits, the satisfaction it provides, and the symbols and ideas it communicates. In other words, they need to create a positive expectation.

Pricing needs to be consistent with the overall marketing mix strategy of a company. There are three main components marketers need to consider when determining it: cost (the amount needed to produce a product), price (the price customers pay to buy it), and value (the value customers receive). This section covers the factors influencing product pricing and how to calculate it.

Product distribution decisions are one of the most complex and time-consuming, but also extremely important tasks of marketing specialists. This section includes the fundamentals of product distribution and peculiarities of e-commerce.

Integrated marketing efforts help brands establish an online presence and get discovered by potential customers. Product promotion is the art of communicating a product’s benefits to customers and convincing them to acquire the product once, or ideally, multiple times. This part of the Marketing Strategy course features an overview of the key aspects of promotion decisions.

A company’s marketing mix strategy is a dynamic concept. It evolves and requires adjustments aligned with the firm’s overall competitive strategy. As a marketing specialist, you need to understand the dynamic nature of the field and adapt to it.

This section of the Marketing Strategy course describes how firms allocate their funds to different initiatives. Some of the other topics discussed are marketing KPIs, customer lifetime value (CLV), and short vs. long-term marketing goals.