Discuss about the Exploring Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing.
The organisation selected for this assignment is McDonalds, which is one of the largest fast food franchisees in US and it has its branches in almost all parts across the world. The company mainly deals with fast food items and beverages which may include cheese burgers, hamburgers, McNuggets, French fries, different types of cokes and crushes and many more. The new menu of company includes egg wrap, diet coke, chicken nuggets and many more. It provides wide variety of vegetarian as well as non vegetarian snacks. There are more than 32,000 restaurants of McDonalds which are doing well in approximately 117 countries. The company was founded in the year 1940 and now, it is contemplated as the world’s second largest private employer. The current CEO of company is James Skinner who started his career in McDonalds as a manager trainee in the year 1971. The company makes sure to serve its customers in the best possible manner with its wide variety of food items and by providing excellent customer service (McDonalds.co.uk, n.d.).
McDonalds is undoubtedly contemplated as one of the best known brands across the world. At McDonalds, marketing is seen as determining the needs of customers and meeting them with an ease better than its competitors (Le Meunier-FitzHugh and Piercy, 2007). This helps company to build loyal customers. The company perceives that proper research is extremely important in creating the right kind of marketing activities with the main to win customer loyalty as well as to enhance sales. It aims to frame a prominent position in the minds of customers with the help of effective marketing (Fine, 2009).
Marketing plays an extremely significant role in ensuring effective business planning as well as decision making. The type of marketing utilized by McDonalds depends upon the resources invested and the current marketing condition. For instance, the company makes use of television and other advertising support at the time of launch of a new product (Rodrigues, Nikhil and Jacob, 2016).
Apart from this, it is true that marketing highly impacts business planning as a marketer makes sure to attain certain business objective while framing a marketing plan. Hence, effective marketing leads to great business planning and decisions. Also, various business decisions are affected by company’s marketing strategy such as pricing decisions impact the marketing strategy of a company (Peterson, 2015).
When a company decides a price of a product then it focuses on three aspects in which the first is how much amount people are willing to give, second is how much its competitors are offering. Thirdly, it is important to assure that the new prices are giving profits to company. In this regard, McDonalds focuses on all these aspects to ensure the contribution of effective marketing for sound business planning and decision making (Mourdoukoutas, 2013).
A marketing strategy should be created in such a manner by which a major set of its objectives should be met with an ease. These objectives may include what a marketer wants to achieve and how well he is doing to attain these objectives. In this regard, the effective marketing strategies of company help it to achieve its objectives (Mourdoukoutas, 2013). McDonalds implements effective marketing strategies and its results are analyzed in a timely manner to check whether these objectives are met or not. This helps company to become flexible in its marketing activities so that changes can be done whenever required without any kind of major difficulty (Pomposo, 2014).
There are basically five marketing functions that describe the value of marketing at McDonalds within different departments. They may include:
Corporate marketing
This includes global marketing domain to attract large number of customers and McDonalds targets its positioned customers by marketing its activities on the huge platform of television and internet.
Strategic marketing
McDonalds uses strategic marketing to meet its goals by ensuring three elements like providing quality food in a great ambiance, being a socially responsible company and making sure that all the investors get a great return for their investment (Strandvik, Holmlund and Gronroos, 2014).
Product management
With the help of product management, the company makes sure to bring something innovative in its products in a timely manner to attract a huge crowd with an ease.
Product marketing
Product marketing is done in McDonalds by using the effective product element of the 4 P’s of marketing mix. This is done to show its customers that they are given the best quality of products.
Field marketing
Numerous kinds of marketing campaign are implemented by McDonalds time to time to attract huge traffic. These campaigns are conducted in field as well as online as marketers give chance to its customers to ask for home delivery with great discounts (De Ruyter and Wetzels, 2000).
Marketing is one of the most important functions of an organization as it aware people regarding the products and services of a company. in this regard, some of the major departments of McDonalds that works well with marketing to attain its important objectives may include restaurant operations, quality assurance, human resources, media relations and customer satisfaction (Rodrigues, Nikhil and Jacob, 2016). The department of quality assurance is closely related with marketing as marketers claim in their marketing tactics that their company provides the best quality of food items. Apart from this, marketing works effectively with media relations and customer satisfaction to execute efficient marketing operations to attain customer satisfaction (Lamb, Hair and McDaniel, 2016).
For international organisations, is marketing viewed differently within different strategic business units (SBUs) in different countries?
It is so true that the culture of every country is quite different and McDonalds makes sure to adapt marketing activities as per the requirements of that particular country. In context to this, McDonalds has divided its operations into five geographical divisions namely; US, Europe, Asia, Latin America and Canada. They produce and serve different kinds of food items in different countries as McDonalds do not serve beef products in India as it may hurt the sentiments of Indians. Henceforth, it is noteworthy to state that marketing of McDonalds is viewed differently within different strategic business units in different countries and its geographical distribution is its SBU (Sheth and Sisodia, 2015).
Initially, the prime item of McDonalds was hamburger which was replaced by nine more menu items after three months of its store opening. Gradually, McDonalds got huge success in its business operations which led them to provide its franchisees in different countries. As a result, there were approximately 102 restaurants nationwide by the end of 1959. McDonalds aired its first TV commercial in the year 1966 with the introduction of the new face of the brand named Ronald McDonald (Sheth and Sisodia, 2015).
This was a huge hit and the animated version of this man was used to attract children. In the year 1979, happy meal was invented to drive the attention of kids. After some time, the company introduced cheap meals and snacks to attract the attention of middle class people. The overall analysis shows that effective marketing strategy can take a company to a huge success but a single mistake can be turned into a blunder and impacts the goodwill of a company. On one hand, marketing is a boon for the growth of a company but on the other hand, it can be contemplated to be curse in case of effective measures are not implemented during the whole process (Lamb, Hair and McDaniel, 2016).
Challenges/Barriers to the Change in the Role of Marketing and ways through which they have overcome
A documentary of Super Size Me was aired in the year 2004 which revealed the negative effects of a man going on a McDonald’s only diet. The documentary showed the negative impacts of obesity caused by the snacks of McDonalds. The company went through a major pressure from various childhood obesity groups and to resolve this issue, the company started marketing a healthier and a happier meal (Pomposo, 2014). Apart from this, the sales of McDonalds declined in the year 2014 and to drive effective sales, the company opened its office in Silicon Valley in order to lay emphasis on digital innovation. It is evident that this is the modern era of digitalization and no marketing tactic is effective than online marketing and McDonalds is making effective use of such kind of marketing with the main to attract large number of customers (Baines and Fill, 2014).
Conclusion
From the above discussion, it can be concluded an effective marketing strategy is extremely important for the efficient working of a company. Marketing strategy is really significant for every company to attract huge traffic towards its products and services. In the above discussion, role of marketing has been discussed with respect to McDonalds and how effective marketing helps company to attain its objectives with an ease.
It has been given that how marketing work different departments of McDonalds to attract its customers in masses. Apart from this, it has been revealed that McDonalds has implemented different kinds of marketing activities over the duration of time to attract huge crowd towards its products. The company faced few issues and it overcame them with effective marketing strategies. It is advisable that McDonalds should move to healthier options and if it can continue to reinvent itself for health conscious world then, the company may drive huge sales without any kind of major difficulty.
References
Baines, P. and Fill, C. (2014) Marketing, 3rd Edition. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
De Ruyter, K. and Wetzels, M. (2000) ‘The marketing-finance interface: A relational exchange perspective’, Journal of Business Research, 50, pp.209-215.
Fine, L.M. (2009) ‘The bottom line: marketing and firm performance’, Business Horizons, 52, pp.209-214.
Lamb, C.W., Hair, J.F. and McDaniel, C. (2016) MKTG. Cengage Learning: USA.
Le Meunier-FitzHugh, K. and Piercy, N.F. (2007) ‘Exploring the collaboration between sales and marketing’, European Journal of Marketing, 41 (7/8), pp.939-955.
McDonalds.co.uk. n.d. ‘Marketing at McDonald’s’ [Online]. Available at: https://www.mcdonalds.co.uk/content/dam/McDonaldsUK/People/Schools-and-students/mcd_marketing.pdf [Accessed: 25 January 2017].
Mourdoukoutas, P. (2013) ‘McDonald’s: Three Strategies To Reignite Sales Growth’, Forbes [Online]. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2013/11/23/mcdonalds-three-strategies-to-re-ignite-sales-growth/#5dbf6a6d2ac2 [Accessed on: 25 January 2017].
Peterson, H. (2015) ‘McDonald’s turnaround strategy is in overdrive’, Business Insider [Online]. Available at: https://www.businessinsider.in/McDonalds-turnaround-strategy-is-in-overdrive/articleshow/49030673.cms [Accessed: 25 January 2017].
Pomposo, A. (2014) ‘What is the Secret to McDonald’s Global Branding Success?’ [Online]. Available at: https://www.blurgroup.com/blogs/marketing/what-is-the-secret-to-mcdonalds-global-branding-success/ [Accessed on: 25 January 2017].
Rodrigues, J., Nikhil, S. and Jacob, S. (2016) ‘Promotional Strategies of McDonalds and Market Effects’, Journal of Management Research and Analysis, 3(1), pp. 53-55.
Sheth, J.N. and Sisodia, R.S. (2015) Does Marketing Need Reform?: Fresh Perspectives on the Future. UK: Routledge.
Strandvik, T., Holmlund, M. and Gronroos, C. (2014) ‘The mental footprint of marketing in the boardroom’, Journal of Service Management, 25 (2), pp.241-252.
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