8605-422 Understanding the Importance of Marketing in an Organisation

Unit Overview

8605-422 Understanding the Importance of Marketing in an Organisation is a unit that helps to build the understanding of different principles of marketing that make it a critical practice within organisations facilitating the accomplishment of its goals and objectives. Marketing is one of the most important steps of practice within an organisation. It involves creating a connection with the intended customers and putting up measures that strategically place the products or services within the market to accomplish the desired organisational goals and objectives.

As such, managers who are tasked with the duty of overseeing the marketing process and setting strategic plans for the organisation must appreciate the role that marketing plays in achieving these goals and objectives. This unit focuses on providing the learners with the opportunity to develop an understanding of the marketing approaches that are effective for the organisations and build the ability to effectively conduct marketing campaigns that seek to achieve specific goals and objectives.

8605-422 Understanding the Importance of Marketing in an Organisation is a unit that is designed with the main aim and purpose of creating an understanding of the importance that marketing has for an organisation in relation to improving the performance of the organisation and achieving the desired goals and objectives. The unit focuses on providing both theory and practice associated with marketing functions within the organisations to improve the capabilities and knowledge of the practitioners. This unit is taught in 6 hours of guided learning and contributes 4 credit values to the overall outcome of the ILM Level 4 module.

Suitability of the Unit

Different stakeholders within the organisation must appreciate the role that marketing plays in shaping the structure and performance of the organisation. The managers are the main target of this unit to ensure that they develop an appreciation of the need to put up effective marketing plans and campaigns, which are a critical platform through which the organisations pass information on products to the customers. As such, this unit contributes in building the understanding of organisational leaders who should develop effective strategies to achieve these goals.

The unit is designed to meet the learning needs of middle-level managers within the organisation. Middle managers are leaders tasked with the duties of managing a line, department or region of the organisation and should ensure that the organisation is able to meet the customer needs and expectations within their areas of responsibility. However, this unit is not limited to middle managers.

Executive managers who are in positions of putting up strategic plans for the organisation must show understanding and appreciation of marketing and its impact on organisational performance. Those on lower levels of organisational management, including first-level managers and team leaders, need to understand this information also to ensure they are prepared to play their roles in promoting marketing campaigns or future leadership responsibilities within the organisation.

Learning Outcomes

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

• Receive the market within which their organisation operates to identify the market size, organisations’ share of the market and the profile of the competitors hence ensure they understand the different market factors that affect performance

• Explain the role that marketing function and activities have on the organisational structure, culture and performance in general

• Evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of a specific marketing campaign within their organisations in their area of responsibility

• Provide effective and applicable recommendations aimed at improving the effectiveness of the marketing campaign within the organisation by addressing the limitations identified in the evaluation.

Key Learning Areas

8605-422 Understanding the Importance of Marketing in an Organisation aims at addressing the learning needs of managers on the aspects of marketing and its significance within the organisational context. The learning areas in this unit, therefore, focus on ensuring that awareness is created of the influence that marketing could have on both the structure and performance of the organisation hence creating the need for managers to focus on effective marketing techniques and strategies. Some of the main learning areas within the unit include:

Market Context

This area of learning provides the basic principles of marketing. It is designed to ensure that the learner understands the process so evaluating the position of their organisation within the market context. In this area, the leaner is helped to build skills and understand tools or conducting both environmental scanning and situation analysis and understand the concept of market share as a tool of indicating market competitiveness.

Additionally, they are introduced to product differentiation strategies and consumer segmentation, which improves the understanding of the concepts being learned and the ability to achieve the desired levels of mastery of the elements required in an effective marketing campaign. Understanding the product lifecycle and competitor profiling are also critical subjects of learning within this area which boost the alignment to the market needs and provision of critical contributions that improve performance in the market.

Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns

This area of learning focuses on ensuring that the learners have the understanding of strategies that can be put up to effectively conduct and manage a marketing campaign to achieve the desired organisational goals and objectives. It is important in providing the learners with the understanding of the methods of creating marketing campaigns as approaches to create awareness on a product or service within the market and set the organisation image to the public by presenting a core message or theme.

In this area, the learner is introduced to different types of marketing campaigns and the integrated tools that facilitate the accomplishment of the marketing duties and responsibilities within these campaigns. The subject includes being able to understand the different contexts where each marketing strategy or type of campaign is applicable within the organisation hence preparing the learners for conducting and managing marketing campaigns. They are also helped to develop effective strategies of reviewing the efficiency of marketing campaigns using effective feedback collection methods and reporting to the other organisational stakeholders.

Evaluation

Evaluation is essential in ensuring the learning objectives are achieved. Upon completing this unit, the learners are required to complete a written assessment which evaluates both the mastery of theoretical information and the ability to apply the concepts in a practical organisational setting.