Week 9 Reading Reflection

What struck me the most in this week’s reading is the level of coordination the marketing needs to conduct in order to succeed. This is only further proof to me that giving one department more importance/relevance to business than another is really not the way to go since every one of them is a building block and it’s strength is reflected in the overall health of the business. Indeed a real challenge for the marketers is customer research which is so essential yet easy to frame and conduct in the way it would yield the needed results. I can also see how the mistake beliefs that inhibit market research and reporting like cost, complexity, strategic decisions and irrelevancy makes the difference between the successful and not so successful companies depending on their stand in overcoming these mistaken beliefs. Internet was mentioned as a tool to magnify and facilitate marketing; I do not fully agree since at the same time internet is also facilitating the widening of the distance between the businesses and its customers and that is why we see in a trend in reversing the way we try to understand consumers today. Between the three marketing philosophies, although it probably depends on the industry and the product, I believe that consumer driven philosophy prevails universally. I would like to ask the author to expand more on the pricing strategies and the key elements a business must consider to come up with the most effective strategy, given full context of the industry and business environment as a whole.