CMI 523 Assignment Example
Marketing products and services is an essential activity that applies to many different business situations. Whether using technology to create new processes and improve customer experiences or developing products and services to meet changing needs, the core principles of marketing stay the same.
CMI 523 Principles of Marketing Products and Services aims to help learners understand how marketing supports organisational goals. Learners will explore the marketing environment, learn how to effectively market a product or service, and understand how to evaluate the success of marketing efforts.
Table of Contents
Assessment Questions
Option B, an organisation known to the author. Ravensdale Grain is an agricultural merchant supplying seed, fertiliser, crop protection products and agronomy advice to around 1,400 arable farms across eastern England, employing 260 people including 34 field agronomists. Farm incomes have been volatile, input costs have risen sharply, and buying groups have grown in influence. The business has three objectives for the coming year: launch a new service, grow share of customer spend, and improve customer retention. The service selected for Tasks 3 and 4 is a soil carbon and nutrient management service. Organisational detail is illustrative and anonymised.
Task 1: Account on the role of marketing to support the achievement of organisational objectives
AC 1.1 Evaluate the role of marketing to support the achievement of organisational objectives
Marketing as the connection between what a business can do and what a market will pay for. Kotler and Keller (2021) define marketing as identifying and meeting needs profitably, and the ordering matters: identification precedes provision. Evaluating this at Ravensdale, a merchant that decides its product range from supplier availability rather than from grower requirement has inverted the sequence, which is how businesses accumulate stock nobody wants.
Contribution to each objective. Evaluating the role against the three objectives, the contribution differs sharply. Launching a service requires marketing to establish demand before investment, since a soil service that growers will not pay for is an expensive discovery. Growing share of customer spend depends on cross-selling into accounts already held, which is an account management task marketing supports with evidence rather than promotion. Improving retention depends principally on agronomist relationships, where marketing’s role is supporting rather than leading.
Marketing as market intelligence. Evaluating an underweighted role, marketing tells the organisation what is changing. Blockbuster declined to acquire Netflix in 2000 and protected a store estate that later closed; the failure was interpreting the market rather than executing against it. For Ravensdale the equivalent risk is reading the shift towards environmental land management as a policy irritation rather than as a market forming.
Marketing as an organisational orientation. Mullins (2022) situates marketing among the core functions whose effectiveness depends on the whole organisation rather than on the department alone. Evaluating the broader conception, a market orientation belongs to the whole organisation rather than to a department. Evaluating Ravensdale against this, agronomists hold the customer relationships and generate the intelligence, and none of it reaches the marketing function systematically.
Marketing where the customer is also a business. Evaluating a feature of this market, growers buy on agronomic evidence and margin per hectare rather than on brand preference, which makes technical credibility the operative marketing asset and advertising largely irrelevant.