Marketing Practices throughout the World Most of the contemporary business enterprises use marketing mix when establishing their marketing strategy. The four P’s are: Product, which is cargo and passenger travel in the case, Place, which is worldwide, Price- determined by particular case and Promotion- involves many steps and techniques. The choice of marketing techniques may vary in the marketing of services from the marketing of products, but the basic principles and concepts of marketing are equally important and relevant in both. Basically selling is a micro function which means offering existing products at an agreed price. Often sales people do not control (although they may influence) the production level or quality. Marketing is a macro function, which, in addition to selling, is involved in many other tactical areas, such as: Collecting, storing and analyzing important information regarding markets, competition and future trends. Segmenting the market and identifying specific needs of different customers. Adjusting existing products and creating new products to suit the changing customer needs. Deciding on price levels acceptable to the customers and to the company (ensuring value for money to the customers and ensuring long-term profitability for the company) is another significant task of marketing people. Selecting suitable channels which can be used as pipelines’, either to distribute the products to customers or attract customers to the products/services. In this paper we are going to analyze marketing practices of three different countries of various states of development: developed, developing and underdeveloped. We are going to use Canada, Russia and countries of Latin America as examples for our research. People in today’s global village are not defined by their ethnic origins any more than by their age or generation Contemporary marketing is, fundamentally, multicultural, as consumers live in a multicultural world. Multicultural marketing concentrates on learning about consumers rather than imposing definitions on them. Gone are the days (if they ever existed) when marketing could rely on sloganistic assumptions such as generational,ethnicand life cycleuniformity. There may be generational, ethnic and life cycle aspects to a market, one may even argue that consideration of these is a necessary part of marketing research, but one cannot argue that consideration of these aspects alone is sufficient.
Life cycle marketing, in contrast, holds that generations are not unique, that all behavior can be predicated by a person’s age: It does not matter who you are, but merely how old you are. The limitations of both generational and life cycle marketing are most clearly shown when those who argue that the baby boom generation is uniquely defined, turn around and argue that as they age their behavior will follow life cycle patterns similar to those of previous generations. The reality of the marketplace is that consumers are defined by more than their age or the cohort they were born with. The consumer population of Canada has a diversity that is both wide and deep. One dimension of this diversity is ancestry based. Over five million Canadians, 18% of the population, were not born in Canada. Three percent of the population identify themselves as part of the aboriginal population, and 15% identify themselves as being part of a visible minority. Only 64% of the Canadian population has a single ethnic origin, with 11% of British ethnic origin, 9% of French ethnic origin, and 43% of single ethnic origin other than British or French. Of the 36% of the population with multiple ethnic origins, 27% have at least one ethnic origin that is neither British nor French. Six and a half million people in Canada have some knowledge of languages other than English or French. At first glance, this ancestry-based diversity may seem to offer support for what is often termed ethnicmarketing, of approaching consumers as though their consumption patterns were solely defined by their ancestry. As with life cycle or generational marketing, ethnic marketing grossly oversimplifies the factors that determine consumer behavior: people, especially people in the global village, are not defined by their ethnic origins any more than they are defined by their age or their generation. What does determine people’s consumer behavior is their uniqueness in terms of the combination of their heritage, ancestry, age, education, income, life experience and, fundamentally, their values, what they believe in. Consumer behavior is culturally defined, where culture means values, interests, life styles, beliefs and aspirations. In effective marketing, it is as important that someone is a vegan as it is that they were born in the 20-year period after the Second World War: that they crave power tools as it is that they were born in Guangzhou; that they are fiscal conservatives as it is that they are 26 years old.
Marketing must not only acknowledge the cultural foundation of consumer behavior, it must also acknowledge that people are multi-, not mono-, cultural. Consumers actively belong to many distinct groups of shared interests, moving fluidly back and forth across the myriad of cultural layers that define contemporary society. At one moment a person’s behavior will be largely influenced by an ancestral context, in another by a peer context, in another by a career context and in another by chance. Today’s consumers comfortably switch from hockey to hoops, hip-hop to classical, dim sum to doughnuts, rap to the Rankin Family, without the need of boundaries or borders. Just as marketing was starting to be taken seriously across the financial-services sector, a dramatic shift in what constitutes marketing is underway. The marketing that banks had accepted and endorsed has changed. A straightforward application of the traditional marketing mix,with the well-known 4Ps- Product, Price, Place and Promotion, is no longer sufficient in the financial marketplace of the 2000s. Instead, a new set of ideas has emerged, along with a new set of terms: individualized marketing, interactive marketing, relationship marketing and internal marketing. Banks can no longer be marketing-oriented; they must become market-oriented. To be marketing-oriented implies using a bag of promotional tricks to capture the bank consumer. To be market-oriented, on the other hand, banks must engage in dialogue with existing and potential customers. This requires bank services and approaches to be designed through close contact with the market. It’s estimated that the average consumer is bombarded with up to 3,000 advertising messages each day, and that they remember only 2-3% of these advertisements without prompting. All this competition and noise means that banks have to rethink their advertising strategies. One recent trend has been a shift to more print advertising. Although television remains important, as financial services have grown more complex, banks have been forced to use magazines and particularly newspapers to explain the details of their services. Changing consumer demographics and lifestyles are another reason for the decline in the traditional marketing approach. Financial consumers no longer fall into neat, visible target groups. A rise in the number of women in the work force, more single-person households and the growing seniors population have caused significant marketing change. Today banks must cater to smaller and smaller market niches, and all these changes make mass marketing inappropriate. Associated with lifestyle is the availability of the most valued of all commodities: time. For most consumers, time seems to be continually shrinking. Bank customers want to be able to access their accounts through ABMs and phones, and use new mini-branches, drive-through tellers and boutique branches. This may in turn lead to saturation of the distribution channels.
