Value Based Marketing Essay

Value-based marketing requires organizations to provide greater value to consumers than competitors, achieved through assessing all business processes from a consumers’ viewpoint. This requires attentiveness and continuous monitoring as consumers’ needs and wants are affected by numerous dynamic factors.

An essential element of developing a marketing strategy and marketing plan is an understanding of customer needs and wants (including what customers want regarding environmentally friendly products) and the marketing environment. In order to fully understand the marketing environment, organizations must analyse, the immediate environment and the macroenvironment (encompassing, amongst other aspects, changing social, cultural and legal trends).

Macroenvironmental factors

Factors that organizations should consider are culture, demographics, social issues, technological advances, economic situation, and political / regulatory environment

One growing social trend has been consumers’ greater awareness and concerns about environmental and health matters. This has led consumers to demand environmentally friendly products (e.g. energy saving, recyclable, non-toxic, etc.) as well as healthy alternatives (e.g. organic foods, natural cleaning and personal care products, etc.).

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

As a result of greater social awareness, consumers have growingly demanded that organizations take responsibility for the ethical, social and environmental impact of their business operations. Whilst some economists have argued that CSR activities are unnecessary and in opposition to for-profit organizations’ primary objective of shareholder wealth maximisation, many organizations have found that adopting a stakeholder approac...

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...ng market mix variables in order to provide customers with a clear and distinctive understanding of the product or service’s features and characteristics in comparison to competing products and services.

Positioning strategies either focus on how the product or service affects the consumer or how it is better than competitors’ products or services. Organizations can position their products and services either by focussing on value, salient attributes, symbols or competition.

Developing a positioning strategy is a five step process requiring:

1. Determining consumers’ perceptions and evaluations of the product or service in relation to competitors,

2. Identifying competitors’ positions,

3. Determining consumer preferences,

4. Selecting the position, and

5. Monitor the positioning strategy.

Understanding why Stoneyfield Farm selected the “engaging consumer” approach