Bonnie Feigenbaum introduces our new Lecture Series on Marketing

Thank you so much. Happy to catch. Well, I'm going to be introducing you to me and the new marketing lecture series will be launching in spring 2022. I'm a senior public relations consultant with Tinker Media and a university lecturer with almost 30 years of teaching experience, creating and delivering courses at five post-secondary institutions, including, as Ron said, Montreal's McGill University. I'm bilingual, French and English. I'm a marketing and communications professional. I have 15 years of participation in politics as an elected official, a town councillor, and a chief of staff to a federal member of parliament. I've worked with over 25 different groups through my almost 40 years of community involvement. Now, marketing, the tools we use to communicate our company values.

to our customers and the research we do in order to determine how to use the tools and how effective we are in connecting with that client base is the focus of the first and second lecture series, Intro to Marketing and Marketing Research. I'll be preparing an advanced marketing topics. and social marketing with a focus on stakeholder management for series three and four in the coming months. Now, the marketing process is a good opportunity to show a relationship between a number of the concepts we will be discussing during the lecture series. In the first four steps of the process, the companies need to work to understand consumers. create customer value, and build strong customer relationships so that in the final step, we can capture value from the consumers in the form of sales, profits, and loyalty. Now, we need to understand how to accomplish this. What we need to understand in business is you, the consumers.

Marketing is all about understanding human behavior. It's all about understanding all the facets of the consumer. For example, are a business person, a friend, a family member, a consumer with needs making choices from a wide assortment of possibilities. Now, it's the data about the consumers that help marketers define the target market. And the marketing concept, what we're going to be delving into in depth in the series, is all about understanding the consumer's wants, needs, and behaviors. Because most successful businesses have realized that a key competitive weapon of 2020s is having this unrelenting drive for quality and customer satisfaction, making sure that our customers are getting what they want from us. That is because of the paramount importance of keeping existing customers. Now, the ability to retain those customers is grounded in an intimate understanding of their needs, which comes primarily from marketing research.

Customer retention. increases revenues and market share, decreases costs and demands on employees' time, and improves employee retention and productivity. In fact, a Baines & Company study estimated that if you could reduce customer defection by 5%, you could boost your profitability by over 25%. Now, this consumer behavior, the study about people in the marketplace, covers topics such as demographics, psychographics, reference groups, consumption communities, brand loyalty, and marketing segmentation. We'll be covering those topics in the consumer behavior section of the Intro to Marketing series and in the segmentation and differentiation lecture in the marketing series. Because of the new medias that are out there, the social media, what we call non-traditional marketing tools, marketers have to incorporate these interactive approaches to build targeted two-way, two-way customer relationships.

We're not talking just about customer relationship management, but also about customer managed relationships. Consumers have more information about brands than ever before. So companies can no longer rely on marketing by intrusion, interrupting the... process, companies must market by attraction, creating marketing offerings that involve the consumer. We're not interrupting them. We're involving them in our communication process. And this has become this consumer generated marketing has become a significant marketing force. So when we will be covering the. Promotion P, which is actually the Integrated Marketing Communication Plan, we will go over the concept of paid, owned, and earned advertising. Paid is billboards, mass marketing, commercials, newspapers, ads. Owned is your own content, like your websites, your pamphlets. And earned... are what other people say about you.

The social media influencers, your consumers, your brand loyal friends, or sometimes your distractors. So earned media is seen as more credible and reliable than paid and owned media because it is not coming from you as the company and it is not. being paid for by you. It is coming from what we would hope would be an unbiased source. You know, in fact, during the marketing lecture, we will be covering all the elements of the marketing mix, product, price, place, and promotion, because an effective marketing program has to blend all of the marketing mix elements in order to achieve the company's marketing objective and delivering the correct value proposition to your customers. So listen, I'm always asked at the end of these series, are marketers manipulators? And my answer is, yeah. That's our job.

Effective marketing programs or interventions are based on this deep understanding of the population to be targeted and how this targeted concept, product or service fits into their lives. It's our responsibility to learn and be there with the right product, right at the right place, at the right promotion, at the right price. That's what our job is to. create that connection. But you know, as Spider-Man's Uncle Ben would always say, with great power comes great responsibility. So it's our responsibility as well to create these win-win situations that benefit our company and our customers in order to have long-term profitable relationships. Ron, if you want to ask me a question.

Absolutely. Look, when we're talking about even an institutional business to business sales, we talk about the funnel process. prospecting. Well, this is the pre-sales. Marketing is the pre-sales process. We have to know what type of product we need to sell to our consumers. We need to know what features that they want to know about the most. That's market research. That's product development. That's one of the P's. Talking about packaging, how important sustainability is becoming in the new world. Well, that's macro environmental research. Understanding packaging is the augmented product offering. It's part and parcel of sales.

Absolutely. You have to know your client is the first step. If you don't know your client, you know, you're shooting darts at a blank dartboard. You don't know where the target is. Perfect. Perfect. Essentially what it is. But if you want to talk about the more of a connection with marketing and sales, training comes from marketing. We have to know what the customer needs to learn, needs to understand why our product is better. We're talking about research with learning what the legal requirements are. We need to understand regulations.

Well, listen, when we're talking about brand loyalty, the first step to brand loyalty is brand awareness. If they don't know that you exist, how can they even start being loyal to you? The pre-sales process is getting out there in the world properly. Trade shows, how well are you monetizing your trade show, your experience? Are you collecting every single... email address of every person that goes by? Are you making your booth attractive to have people want to visit, to give you that information? Is there something, some promotion you're giving at that point? And how are you following up on that? How are you creating that, continuing on with that connection?

No, you have to know what your client wants. The more you learn about your client, the more you're able to make that cold call warm because you know who you're speaking to. Even the basics of research. I'm teaching a class right now in a vocational college where I'm teaching them introduction to sales and communications. And that's what I'm telling them. And it's amazing with the role playing because I'm asking them to import a product from their home country. It's an immigrant student population into Canada. And they're going to learn how to sell it to Canada, distribute it. So the first thing is prospecting. And I wanted them to do a cold call to a prospect. One group is selling these amazing product, water bubbles. They're water packed in seaweed tablets. So you have no more bottles. You just have these tablets. You pop it in your mouth. You have a glass of water. Amazing.

And they're calling the Palais du Congrain, a convention center in our area. So they found out who the person was. How did they find out? Free information on LinkedIn. Free information on the website. They found out who their distributor was. They found out how much they pay for hauling away the garbage, what the greenhouse gas emission reduction would be. And this cold call by knowing, learning about the Palais de Congres' green goals, their intro pitch wove in that phrasing. So the person who was speaking to them was like, could be like, you know me so well, you know exactly. how to make me the hero of my corporation. So we talk about business to consumer marketing as having an emotional component and business to business not having an emotional component, but that's not true. You are a sales person talking to a buyer who is also a person. You need to deal with them.

Well, you realize that you have to actually have two targeted programs if you're trying to communicate with two different age demographics. But it's not just age demographics that might make you choose to have different targeted programs. I think it's important to honestly take advantage of the 35 and underset. They know the computer systems. so much better than us. As a teacher, as a professor, I say, I taught them well. Please let them take over. They can, I am always, my children are obviously not of that age. The 20 to 25 said, and I let them set up my computers. I let them teach me. They learn. by YouTube. And that's what like the talent and acquisition departments, the former human resource departments are making shifts as well. Our recruitment strategies have had to change to get those really outgoing salespeople. We have to understand that if we don't support them well and give them enough to live on, they're going to get a side gig.

So their loyalty to our company is also going to be at risk. So it's also a whole shift on the work-life balance expectations.

It's certainly my pleasure. And, you know, I believe in teaching and sharing knowledge. And it's my passion to share marketing with everybody else. I'm a big marketing geek. I believe in its power. And I would love to help persuade you to join me down that marketing path.