523 Principles of Marketing Products and Services

Unit Overview

523 Principles of Marketing Products and Services is a unit within the CMI Level 5 module that ensures effective communication between the organisation and the customers. In the modern market, marketing products and services has become a critical approach to ensure that the company is able to improve its market performance. This involves being able to build the market share and maximise the sales of the products and services. Leaders must ensure that they establish effective marketing strategies that are guided by specific principles to achieve the desired awareness of their products within the competitive markets.

The principles of marketing revolve around ensuring that the leaders understand the standards of marketing as well as the diverse tools that they can use to ensure that they create programs aimed at boosting the market performance of their products and services. Leaders should steer the process of marketing within the organisation to achieve the desired goals and objectives in terms of sales, market share, and financial performance. 523 Principles of Marketing Products and Services is a unit that is aimed at improving the ability of the leaders to impact the marketing activities of the organisations.

The unit helps the learners to understand the basic principles of marketing that they can use to set up effective practices in their areas of responsibility. Within this unit, the learners are also guided to understand the different techniques and tools that can be used for marketing. These tools enable them to effectively scan the environments and ensure they put up strategies to maximise the performance of the team within these environments. The unit is taught in 23 hours of guided learning and contributes 6 credit values towards the completion of the module.

Suitability of the Unit

Marketing is the responsibility of several stakeholders within t eh workplace. It is a practice that involves different departments and units within the organisation ranging from the sales and marketing departments to the strategic units of the organisation. As such, several stakeholders are impacted. This makes 523 Principles of Marketing Products and Services a critical unit within the organisation that helps to build the capabilities of the affected leaders within the organisation to develop and manage coordinated marketing of the products and services. The unit helps these leaders to understand the principles that should be implemented when putting up marketing strategies within the market.

The unit is designed to serve the learning needs of the middle managers. These are leaders in charge of departments, units, and lines within the organisation. This unit helps them to build the desired capabilities in relation to improving the performance of the organisation in the markets within their area of responsibility. Senior leaders can also benefit from the contents of this unit. It can help to further improve their capabilities to support marketing activities from the strategic levels. Other stakeholders, including external consultants and interested individuals, can benefit from the unit that helps them to understand the basic principles of improving marketing activities performance as well as providing support to the organisations where they are engaged.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the unit, the learners should be able to:

• Understand the role of marketing in supporting the achievement of the organisational goals and objective

• Evaluate the influence of stakeholders on the approaches adapted for marketing a product or service within the organisation

• Assess the impact of the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses on the process of marketing within the workplace

• Identify the impact of opportunities and threats in the marketing environments in the process of marketing a product or service within the organisation

• Develop recommendations to support the marketing process in their areas of responsibility

• Create a tactical marketing plan that uses the marketing mix to market a product or service

• Analyse the resource requirements in the process of marketing within the workplace

• Evaluate the risks associated with the marketing process of a product or service

• Identify the methods that can be used to measure the marketing process of a product or service.

Key Learning Areas

This unit improves the ability of leaders to effectively coordinate the marketing process, which is important in ensuring that the organisation is able to achieve its goals and objectives. Some of the main areas of learning within the unit include:

Understanding the Principles of Marketing

This area of learning helps the learners to understand the effective tools that can be used to market. Learners are guided to understand the significance of marketing within the workplace and the role of each stakeholder in creating a sustainable marketing process and activity. The learners are also guided to ensure they effectively use the legal and organisational requirements to allocate duties to different players within the organisation to ensure that marketing activities are successful. Learners are guided to understand tools such as PESTLE analysis and the SWOT tool to ensure that they evaluate the areas to target in the marketing process successfully.

Creating a Marketing Plan

This area of learning contributes to understanding the factors that could impact the marketing process. The learners are introduced to the marketing mix, which is one of the main tools for creating marketing practices and approaches. Tools such as the 4Ps and 7Ps of marketing are considered when creating this marketing plan hence helping to understand the processes and approaches that can be used to create an effective marketing plan within the business context.

The learners are also guided to understand the resources that they need in the process of creating a marketing plan, as well as the ability to effectively mitigate the risks associated with the marketing of a product or service. They are also guided to understand approaches such as 360-degree feedback and market analysis to measure the marketing outcomes from a program that has been implemented within the workplace.

Evaluation

The evaluation process is essential in ensuring the learners are able to achieve the desired standards of learning within this unit. This process of evaluation involves a written assessment and supervised practice. The two approaches are used together to evaluate both the mastery of theoretical skills and the practical capabilities of the learner when exposed to a practical organisational setting.