A marketing model is a tool that advertisers, merchants, or brands can use to understand the strength and earning potential of their business. It gives us a framework to rationally evaluate how we’re doing things now compared to our competitors and plan growth strategies for the future.

Theories on marketing, communication science, consumer behavior can help us better understand customer needs, create and deliver value, run the business, and manage the brand.

In this article, I hand-pick 15 different marketing models to help you decide the best strategy for you and your business,  predict the impact your marketing tactics have on consumers, and achieve your marketing goal in the end.

Content

• Marketing Strategy
• Consumer Behavior
• Integrated Marketing Communication
• Brand Management

Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy refers to a business’s overall game plan for reaching prospective consumers and turning them into customers of the products or services the business provides.

1.1 SWOT Analysis

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, and so a SWOT analysis can be used as a tool to assess these four aspects of your business.

1.2 Porter’s Five Forces

Porter’s Five Forces Framework, first published in Harvard Business Review in 1979, is a method for analyzing the competition of a business.

1.3 STP Marketing Model

STP Marketing Model (Segmenting, Targeting, Positioning) is a framework that simplifies the process of market segmentation.

Learn more about Segmentation, Targeting, & Positioning in Hubspot’s guide.

1.3.1 Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, and Gen Z

See the latest research at McKinsey.

1.4 Marketing Mix: 4Ps

The marketing mix or the 4Ps in marketing  is a foundation model in marketing

The 4Ps are:

• Product (or Service).
• Place.
• Price.
• Promotion.

An extended marketing mix is also used, 7 Ps, made up of the original 4 Ps with “process, people, and physical evidence”.

The 4 Cs model was introduced as a more customer-driven replacement of the 4 Ps in the 1990s. There are two theories based on 4 Cs: Lauterborn’s 4 Cs (consumer, cost, convenience, and communication), and Shimizu’s 4 Cs (commodity, cost, channel, and communication).

1.4.1 Product Life Cycle

The product life cycle is the process a product goes through from when it is first introduced into the market until it is removed from the market. The life cycle has four stages – introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.

1.4.2 Kotler Five Product Levels

• The 1st level is the core benefit: the services or benefits the customer is really buying. A hotel guest is buying rest and sleep.
• At the 2nd level, the marketer must turn the core benefit into a basic product. Thus, a hotel room includes a bed, bathroom, and towels.
• At the 3rd level, the marketer prepares an expected product, a set of attributes and conditions buyers normally expect when they purchase this product. Hotel guests expect a clean bed, fresh towels, and so on.
• At the 4th level, the marketer prepares an augmented product that exceeds customer expectations. In developed countries, brand positioning and competition take place at this level.
• At the 5th level stands the potential product, with all the possible augmentations and transformations the product or offering might undergo in the future. Here companies search for new ways to satisfy customers and distinguish their offering.

Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior is the study of consumers and the processes they use to choose, use (consume), and dispose of products and services, including consumers’ emotional, mental, and behavioral responses.

2.1  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” in Psychological Review.

2.2 Consumer Perception and Cognition Process

There is much academic research on perception and cognition. The picture below portrays how consumers perceive, accept, and remember an ad.

2.3 Consumer Decision Making Process

The consumer decision-making process involves these steps:  consumers identify their needs, gather information, evaluate alternatives, and then make their buying decision.

2.4 Response Hierarchy Models

The Response Hierarchy Models explains the consumer responses and behavior to the advertising process. It provides a complete understanding of the responses of a customer through all stages of his path from unaware of the product to the purchase action.

The AIDA model, standing for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action is well-known.

Cognitive–Affective/Emotion–Conative
Learn/Think–Feel–Do/Behavior

2.5 The FCB Grid

The FCB grid or Foote, Cone and Belding model is an integrative approach to interpret the consumer’s buying behavior and its implication for adopting a suitable advertising strategy.

2.6 The Elaboration Likelihood Model

The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion is a dual process theory describing the change of attitudes. The ELM was developed by Richard E. Petty and John Cacioppo in 1980. The model aims to explain different ways of processing stimuli, why they are used, and their outcomes on attitude change.

Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)

Integrated Marketing Communications, or IMC, as we’ll call it, means integrating all the promotional tools, so that they work together in harmony.

3.1 Communication Process

In 1948 Laswell proposed a model to describe mass communication processes known as the Five W’s Method or Laswell’s Communication Model, which focuses on “Who (says) What (to) Whom (in) Which Channel (with) What Effect”.

The communication process is not linear but interactive.

3.2 Marketing Communication

Marketing communication (MarCom) is the promotion of the marketing mix (4P) and it includes advertising, PR, sales promotion, direct response, events, digital marketing, personal selling, and more.

3.3 Impact of Advertising Expenditures

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Figure 5.5 displays a more realistic conceptualization of the relationship between marketing expenditures and advertising. The factors present in the relationship include:
• The communications goal
• Threshold effects
• Diminishing returns
• Carryover effects
• Wear-out effects
• Decay effects

3.4 Advertising and Creative Pyramid

It reflects how people respond to advertising and how creative can be designed.

Brand Management

Strategic brand management involves the design and implementation of marketing programs and activities to build, measure, and manage brand equity.

4.1 Brand Resonance Model

The brand resonance model describes how to create intense, active
loyalty relationships with customers. The model considers how brand positioning affects what consumers think, feel, and do and the degree to which they resonate or connect with a brand.

4.2 Branding Value Chain

The brand value chain is a designed, structured concept that manages the results of brand equity and the manner in which marketing decisions boost brand value.

Related Reading:

• Gary Armstrong, Philip Kotler – Marketing: An Introduction
• Philip T Kotler, Kevin Lane Keller – A Framework for Marketing Management
• Kenneth E. Clow, Donald E. Baack – Integrated Advertising, Promotion, and Marketing Communications
• Kevin Lane Keller – Strategic Brand Management: Building, Measuring, and Managing Brand Equity
• Solomon, Michael R – Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being
• Em Griffin, Andrew Ledbetter, Glenn Grayson Sparks- A First Look at Communication Theory

Bonus: download the ebooks at Library Genesis. Happy Learning!