Marketing Essay

An article in The Australian Financial Review on Tuesday 26 May 2009 shows how the marketing principles of marketing intelligence and target marketing used by Australian shoemakers affect their companies’ footwear strategies.

According to this article, the local shoemaker builds their own managerial, organizational and producing strategy under the whole competitive world market, although they do not have the premium price. Then, advanced production system aiming at dispatch resellers’ orders, requires high educational employees or workers who have been done professional training. Thus, shoemaker is trying to apply marketing intelligence to achieve an opportunity of development.

Marketing intelligence is defined as “the systematic collection and analysis of publicly available information about competitors and developments in the marketplace” (Kotler et al, 2010 p.172). By means of this definition, the local shoemaker clearly knows that fact, it is impossible to put a lower price than densely populated countries, such as China, Vietnam or Philippines where producers maybe run much bigger batch sizes to produce and sell. As a result, manufacturer is paying much more attention to increase working efficiency through multi-workers who can work out more than one process of making a pair of shoes. Moreover, what the most important thing to improve delivery quality, is that producer uses the supply chain from raw materials and convert into finished goods to ended customers. There are some apparent advantages by using these strategic decisions. One of them is basically reduces employees’ cost due to the multi-workers applied, but also responding quickly by supply chain and efficient inventory system approach to achieve the goal of marketing intelligence.

The article indicates the concept of target marketing segment as well. As we all know, market need to be divided into several parts to satisfy what customers need and want. It means that different groups of customers...