Video Transcript: Intro to Marketing

hi everyone. My name is Tom Tubergen, and I have the privilege, perhaps even  the honor, of spending the next several weeks with you, talking about a subject  that I'm personally very passionate about, and that is marketing. I've been  involved in marketing for many, many years, decades even. And I know a lot  about the topic, and I know the power that marketing can bring to you and to  perhaps the ministry application that you're aiming towards or moving towards in your own personal life. So some of the things that we're going to talk about, talk  about in our introduction here today to marketing is the definition of marketing,  what it's all about. We'll talk about some of the important concepts of what  needs are, wants, demands, marketing philosophies, the difference between  goods and services, customer markets, how we segment our target market, all  that, all of those types of concepts, pest marketing concepts. It sounds like  some sort of a pest control thing, but actually it's a much more involved than  than that. We'll talk about the introduction to segmenting target markets,  positioning your products or your services, marketing mix the tasks that are  involved in actually doing marketing. One of the things that isn't lost on me is  why we're actually doing this particular course at a seminary. People equate  marketing with selling with profit making. It's a big piece of a profit making  venture. So why is it that we are actually here doing marketing? And the short  answer is, Because you have to, I'm under the impression that marketing is  actually a requirement of the Accreditation Committee for you to get your  degree. But there's more to it than that, and as I was thinking this through, it  occurred to me that this might very well be the first time during your studies here at the Christian Leadership Institute, where you won't be learning so much about your Christian faith as much as you're going to learn how to articulate that faith  to the people who you most want to hear your message. So that's a really  important concept that we're going to talk about now. Part of that is that I really  have tried heavily to modify the material of marketing from being a profit making  venture to actually. How does this apply to you in a practical sense? So some of  the outcomes of this introduction for marketing course is to help you identify and understand the processes behind who you intend to react or reach with your  ministry, and why would they actually even be interested in your ministry or in  your particular effort. What's going to motivate these people to have an interest  in your message, and then how are they going to learn about you and your  message? So there's all these things that are rolling around in here, the who,  the why, the what, and how are they going to learn about you and your ministry? That's what this particular course is all about. Let's talk about the definition of  marketing. A lot of people kind of equate marketing with sales, and sales is  actually kind of an entity or a function of its own within a profit making venture.  Sales is where you actually tuck some samples under your arm, and you go  down the street and you go visit a potential client, and you say, here's what I  have, this is what I'm selling. Here's how much it costs and how long it will take 

me to get it to you. Marketing actually comes before the sales effort. Marketing  actually will say, here's who you need to go visit, here's why you need to visit  them. Here's what they're going to be interested in. So it's a whole function of  processes that take place before you actually are going to go out and do the  sales work. So there's a very distinct line between marketing as a function and  sales as a function. And the marketing function itself has many parallels in a  Christian ministry, as far as, like I just said a few moments ago, who you're  going to talk to, why you're going to talk to them, and what it is you're going to  say to them that's going to resonate with these people. All very important stuff,  some of the key parallels in marketing that we need to focus on throughout this  course. Is that marketing is generally thought of as a corporate for profit activity.  Yet nearly every aspect of a corporate for profit marketing activity is directly  applicable to articulating our faith and promoting your ministry. And my goal, as I said a moment ago, is to make this course really as practical as possible in a  non profit situation, your goal is to apply each of these marketing concepts as a  practical way to your unique ministry goals, whether you're in a wealthy  suburban Chicago neighborhood or a poverty challenged Metro rural area of any region, like, say, South Los Angeles, any world region that's hostile to God's  truth. And the strategies that we talk about here really apply equally to everyone. It's only the tactics that will change from one situation to the next, and this  course will help you to figure out what those tactics are. Let's talk about the  definition of marketing. What is marketing? I mentioned a moment ago that  marketing is distinctly different from sales. Marketing is how you articulate and  communicate your story to attract customers, partners, investors, donors,  employees and anyone else that you're going to interact with throughout your  career, throughout your ministry. It's a carefully scripted set or combination of  messages and the impressions and especially the perceptions, which are  probably the most important thing that help users to decide if they're going to  welcome you into their lives as a necessity, as a nice to know or a nice to have,  or as just a plain nuisance. Marketing is the manner in which you manage and  control how people interact with you and your message. It's the sum total of all  the impressions, all of the perceptions that you are either deliberately or  accidentally going to create, and unfortunately, what happens is that people  don't pay attention to the perceptions and the impressions that they're creating,  and they throw off a lot of negative vibes, which do a lot of damage, a lot of  harm To the overall team effort. Perceptions are almost always more important  than reality in the real world, just a few example of who needs to market. We talk about resource markets. We talk about manufacturers, intermediate markets,  government markets, marketing, I should say consumer marketing, marketplace  and market space type activities and anyone really who needs to communicate  a product, a service or communicate information to a targeted audience, to get  them to motivate them to take some sort of an action or do some sort of an 

activity. Let's talk about the core concept of marketing. We mentioned. One of  the things was the concept of needs versus wants versus demands. There's  things in life that we need to have, there's things in life that we want to have, and then there's things in life that is demanded of us. In for example, a need is a  need for food, a need for clothing, a need to, you know, do basic stuff in life,  such as that, just survival. Those are needs. Then there's wants. I want a car so  I can drive to my place of employment instead of taking the bus. There's  emotional wants, the need to be loved, the need to belong to a group, for  example, or a club. Those are wants. Needs have to be met before wants can  be taken care of. Examples of demands would be typically in a government type situation where we demand that our government protects us, that they handle  the currency, they handle the economy. Those are some examples of demands.  Few more marketing concepts. Here. We're talking about marketing channels,  supply chains, competition, marketing environments. And if you ever get around  people who are involved in business management or involved in marketing or  sales management, you'll sometimes hear these terms being thrown around  marketing channels means that you have different ways of taking your product  to market or in a ministry setting, you have different ways of getting your ministry broadcast out to different segments of your market, for example. So if you have  a church and you have the availability of putting your worship services on cable  television. That's one marketing channel. Another marketing channel might be to intentionally promote your youth group throughout the area, throughout the  neighborhood. Supply Chain refers to all of the vendors for company that supply raw materials for you to create your product with, and supply chain  management, depending on what the company makes, what they manufacture  can actually get fairly complicated, and the management entity in and of itself.  So Supply Chain Management refers to managing these vendors. It refers to  getting product in on time, managing product quality, making sure that the stuff  they're supplying you is actually going to do the job, the anticipated job that they  were you were expecting it to do and pricing. The next term that we'll talk about  is competition. There's just competition in every aspect of life, and marketing is  probably right at the point of all that we actually can get into a whole discipline of marketing that talks about doing competitive analysis and talking about how you  get your product or your service or your information to to compete very  effectively against other other competitive products and services marketing  environment. It's kind of a bigger concept, bigger term. We are talking about the  whole environment, the political, the economic, the strengths and weaknesses  of your product, the opportunities, the threats. And we'll cover these a bit more  later, in much more detail. So when we talk about the scope of marketing,  marketing people get involved, typically with 10 different types of entities,  marketing goods, marketing services, marketing experiences, such as travel  experiences or travel with a purpose, type of an experience, events, marketing, 

events, marketing people, especially in a political situation, places, properties,  Organizations, information, which is something that you're going to be focused  on, and ideas. So what's the difference between goods and services? This is  kind of self obvious. Goods are tangible. You can hold it in your hand. You can  pick it up if it's not too heavy. Well, services are more intangible, where you  actually send someone out to do plumbing work, or you have somebody come  and check your furnace, or you got a problem with your refrigerator, somebody  comes to fix it. That's a service customers may potentially participate in certain  service, processes, activities and transactions. The demand for these services  can be more difficult to predict than the demand for goods. The difference  between goods and services that services can't obviously, be stored as physical  inventory. You can't go out in the warehouse behind the shop and actually count  services sitting on the shelf. Service management skills are paramount to a  successful service encounter, and service facilities typically need to be in close  proximity to the customer. So in other words, a plumber is not going to travel  200 miles to go fix somebody's plumbing, because there's going to be a least a  half a dozen plumbers much closer by that will do it for a lot less money,  whereas selling goods, selling services, or even information, can go  international marketing. Environment, some of the things that we consider with  marketing environment will be demographics. This is something that you will be  very important to most people who are working or anticipating a ministry of  some sort, knowing who. It is. You're going to talk to what age group they're in,  all of the characteristics of that age group and so on, economic conditions. We  talk about the prosperity. We talk about whether or not the area or the region is  in recession or recovery mode. What's the inflation? What are the interest rates? Competition? Again, it's a part of the marketing environment. Who are your  competitors? What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? And in a  ministry setting, again, this may not seem to be quite so obvious, but you do  have other religions out there. You have other pastors out there other churches  out there that are all sort of competing for those same people to sit in their seats on Sunday or Wednesday night or whatever the case may be. Social and  cultural forces, this could vary widely, not only from region to region, but from  different parts of the world. Political legal forces varies again, from one region to  one country to the next, as to the freedom that we enjoy to articulate our faith.  And then there's the technology aspect of this that comes into play as well. How, how is it that we would deliver our message to people, our information? There's  a concept called Porter's Five Forces. About 20 years ago, there was a  professor and business professor at Harvard called Michael Porter, and he really staked his claim in business school, marketing management based on a very  intense study of competition. And He came up with five forces that really  influence what happens out in the real market. And you see them listed here.  There's rivalry amongst the existing players. They're competing with each other 

to get the most customers, to be the most profitable, to grow more from one  year to the next. You have the threat of new entrants. How easy is it for  someone to decide that they want to make what you make, then we have the  threat of substitutes, again, knocking you off. Is there an easier way to solve the  problem that your product, your service, is solving? And then we talked about  bargaining power of the buyers, or versus bargaining power of the suppliers. So  those are the five specific forces that Michael Porter came up with relative to  marketing and competition. We're going to talk a lot more in another module  about the pest concepts. Pest actually stands for environmental issues that are  going to affect you and your ministry opportunity or a marketing situation. And  pest actually stands for political environment, economic environment,  sociological, cultural type influences as well as technological influences. What  sort of technology is out there that can help me get my message out to the  people that are that I'm trying to reach. So if you're trying to reach a group of  young people that you want to participate in your ministry, perhaps you might  consider Twitter or instant messaging or Facebook or something of that nature,  potentially, whereas, if you're doing some sort of a senior citizen ministry, Twitter is probably not the route to go. Just a brief introduction to segmentation, we're  going to have several modules on this, because segmentation within marketing  is actually very important. And I was just alluding to that the segmentation of the  different age groups and how they behave, the seniors versus the young,  younger people, and segmentation is dividing your total market of potential  prospects and customers into subsets or segments. And these segments are  generally characterized by having a variation in customer response and  behavior marketing mix. And we'll refer to marketing mix later. We'll talk to talk  about that. We talked about a diffused market of geographic, demographic,  psychographic and behavioral context, targeting and positioning, selection of the segment. What segment are you going to go after? What one are you going to  focus on? We'll talk about market. Aggregation strategy. We'll talk about things  like single segment concentration or multiple segment concentration products or brands. What kind of image are you trying to create? Are you trying to be the low cost provider? Are you going to be somewhat more of a high priced luxury type  positioning with this, with your product or with your service, and how and then  last the probably the most important point here is, how are you distinct? How are you different from your competition? What advantages do you have? What  advantages disadvantages Do you have from the competition? marketing mix.  This is kind of an important, important concept in marketing. Back when I went  to grad school, it was all about the four P's. It was product price promotion and  place and every marketing campaign is always about what is I'm trying to sell?  What price Am I trying to sell it for? How am I going to promote that and let  everybody know about my product or service, and just exactly where will I be  doing that in years? In the years since then, we they've expanded it to seven Ps,

and I've even heard people talk about 28 Ps, Product Price promotion place. But then they add people, they add process, the process of how they're going to  market this and deliver the product, and then the physical evidence. So they  added a few more Ps in there. I don't know why, what their hang up is with P's,  but that they just added that in there, the four P's. I'd really probably, in our  context of doing some sort of a marketplace or a ministry type application and  marketing, something of that nature, I'd even add a fifth P and I would add the  thing I'd add there would be prayer. I mentioned they had 27 Ps. I'm not even  going to bother to read all these. There's quite a few of them. My own personal  three P's of marketing based on my personal experience, is that these concepts  will serve you very well through your personal ministry. One of the big problems  that people in the business world have is a total lack of patience. They have a  total lack of persistence and perseverance. If they start an initiative to promote  their product, promote their business, and they don't get immediate results  within the first two or three days, they're off on doing something else. Marketing  is something that requires patience. It requires persistence, and it requires a lot  of perseverance. So just be prepared if it doesn't work at first, step back and  understand what it is you learned, what it is you didn't learn, and then reboot  and try it again.