By Mollie Campbell.
Marketing Techniques:
I have been studying marketing and promotion and how they are used when planning an event, or when marketing for a business. I have researched marketing techniques used by Summer Live and Absolute Music.
What is marketing?
Marketing is the techniques used to promote and advertise products or services, this can include market research. Market research is the process of gathering information which can be useful in either figuring out how a business successfully sells their products, or it is used by a business in order to obtain consumer needs, product markets, product feedback and demographic information.
Market research includes primary (the use of surveys, interviews or questionnaires). And secondary (e.g. internal records, or data from previous events). Market research also includes the understanding of the marketing mix, which is Product (analysis of event/production), price (costs, production budget etc.), Place (venue/location) and Promotion (forms of publicity/distribution methods).
I chose Summer Live as one of my companies to research in terms of marketing. I researched the actual event and interviewed one of the organisers. I organised my questions into categories about Product, Price, Place and Promotion and used the responses to help with the creation of my own Marketing campaign.
Product questions: What is Summer Live and what does it have to offer? Why do you think it is successful?
Price questions: What is your budget and where abouts do you decide to distribute it? Why is it free?
Place questions: Is there anything that hasn’t worked well due to the location, or in general?
Promotion questions: How do you go about marketing for an event like this one? Are there any restrictions due to there being more of a general target audience as opposed to specific ones? Do you use merchandise at all? Where do you advertise? Do you have any internal record, or any form of feedback at all?
The second company I chose is Absolute Music. Absolute Music is a Music store located in Bournemouth which sells music equipment, instruments and has rehearsal rooms etc… I interviewed one of the colleagues at Absolute Music.
Product questions: Do you have any store merchandising?
Price: How do you structure your prices?
Place: How do you advertise and where?
Promotion: How do you market for events at Absolute Music? Are there any marketing restrictions? Do you have any internal records, or feedback system? Do you distribute flyers and posters etc?
After analysing both companies, I have learnt how they market their products/events, why their techniques are successful and what techniques they need to work on. I have also discovered the differences between marketing for a business, and marketing for an event.
Mollie Writes 