Marketing a business is one of the key operations of any organization these days. However, such an operation needs careful planning, which is why management of a business goes hand in hand with the decisions taken to market the business. For such planning of a marketing regime, managers and business owners need to have a clear idea of the aims and objectives of their business and organization. They need to understand clearly the market conditions in which their business operates.

The fast evolving manager roles are rapidly leaving behind the traditional marketing practices in terms of theory as well as practice. Early businesses were seen conducting their research and emphasizing on what were known as the three Cs of marketing, that is, Customer, Company and Competitor. However, further analysis has given way to the inclusion of two more Cs. These are Collaborator and industry Context. All these areas are carefully researched on and important decisions are taken in each of these fields to bear an overall result of effective marketing.

Let us look at each of these individually:

• Customer: analyzing the customer behavior is one of the most important functions of management and marketing. Managers first seek to find out their niche customer base. After having identified that they try and break them up into manageable segments. This segmentation of the target customers can be done on the basis of demography, behavior, age grouping, etc. marketers then aim at tracking the purchase and consumption patterns of these segments, as a group or individually, in order to help them develop and improvise on their product better. This is known as perceptual mapping.

• Company: under this aspect of marketing management, managers analyze the cost structure of the company and what bearing it has and the profit of the organization. For this they may also work in tandem with the finance or accounts managers. Managers also seek to delve deep into the inherent competency of the organization based on the kind of resources it possesses, and find out whether its potential is being exploited to the optimum level or not.

• Collaborator: the collaborators form an important aspect of the business and the analysis of related activities forms a major chunk of marketing management activities. Distributor and supplier behavior, that of the joint venture partners, etc is thoroughly observed and analyzed.

• Competitor: this analysis deals with comparing the position of the business in relation to its market competitors. The activities of the competitors are observed to see which policies are exactly having what effect on the market and the customers.

• Context: this involves having a clear idea of the conditions in which the business operates. The economics of how the business functions within the framework of the larger industry is analyzed. Both macro and micro pictures are taken into consideration.

For each of the above marketing management functions, a lot of data need to be collected, processed and analyzed. Tapping the right data out of the existing market conditions is yet another challenge. Market managers generally look to collect data related to the various segments mentioned above.

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