ABSTRACT
The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the marketing factors (if any) that have led to the survival of Bata Shoe Company in the struggling economy of Zimbabwe. For my data collection I used mostly phone calls, Skype interviews and researched documentation. After having all the data gathered a decision was made to use a qualitative approach since it enables me to obtain more in-depth information and has a few restrictions and assumptions on the data col-lected.
Marketing Is a key factor in Organizations since it contributes greatly to their success; basical-ly marketing is a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others.
The research shows Bata being a company that has managed to survive and drag through the economically struggling Country Zimbabwe; has marketing been key a factor that has lead to the survival of the company for this long? Great customer and market focus can keep an Or-ganization on their feet and according to the findings these factors significantly affect a com-pany’s performance.
From the findings it shows a lot of companies from different sectors have closed down or moved out of the country in the past 8 years due to the economic problems and worse of the competition coming from other countries for example china. From my findings not many com-panies market themselves, research their markets or use the marketing mix as a tool of their business this would be because of less completion in the past years until major competitors joined the market and lack of funding. This thesis produces reliable factors that have lead to the collapse of most companies and also shows valid factors that have helped Bata Shoe Com-pany continue running to date.
1Introduction
This introductory chapter is divided into seven subsections
A brief study background will be presented.
The objective and research problem will be presented
Definitions
Literature review
The research question is presented
Limitations
Structure of the study
1.1Background
With Business continuously becoming more competitive the world much smaller to remain organizations need to invest a lot in marketing. Today`s successful companies all have one thing in common –they are strongly customer focused and heavily committed to Marketing.
In this new world marketing is no longer just taken or understood in the old sense of making sales and promotions but is now looking more into other aspects and the main one being satis-fying the customer`s needs. Adopting a good marketing process would mean the marketer has identified the customer’s needs, develops and supplies good products and prices and then lastly distributes and promotes them effectively, adopting such a marketing concept will see the goods selling effectively. The aim of marketing is to understand the customer so that the product or service meets the needs, wants or demands of the customer and the result would be the product or service selling itself.
1.2Objective and research problem
Our research problem can be summarized as: what is marketing and what benefits has it brought to Bata Shoe Company
This thesis came to a conclusion that marketing is not all about your current customers or having enough customers but also about keeping these customers happy by finding out what each customer desires in a product, Maslow’s hierarchy explains the way humans needs and wants differ from one person to the other. An understanding of marketing is of great im-portance to an organization, an organization would need to know what Marketing really is, what it involves and who does it, with the Theoretical research done in this thesis and the answer we got from the respondent it clearly shows there is a lack of knowledge and under-standing of marketing in the organization.
The objective of this thesis is to evaluate the performance of our case company (Bata shoe Company a internationally known shoe making company with their major factory located in Gweru Zimbabwe) in their market and to evaluate whether adopting a marketing concept brought a positive or negative change in the organization in other words my aim is to find out if the Organization benefited from implementing the marketing concept.
To find the best and more reliable data on this investigation and also for me to be able to analyze it, knowledge of business research methods will be put into practice and a method that will make it possible to come up with the correct data and analyzing will be used to come up with suggestions and answers to this thesis.
The topic importance of marketing can be broken down and explained to try and bring a bet-ter understanding of this topic.
1.3Definitions
1.3.1 Marketing and Marketing Mix
Marketing is explained in more general terms as “what an organization must do to create and exchange value with people” (Silk 2006, 3). Kotler an academic focused in marketing takes the deeper stand in explaining what marketing is, “marketing is identifying and meeting hu-man and social needs” (Kotler 2009). With the understanding of what marketing is Kotler also explains what is marketed to support the deeper understanding of what marketing is and this can be provided as a question:-
Most people think of marketing as only promotion; they only see the tip of the marketing ice-berg. However, marketing is much more than that to me marketing is the activity, set of in-stitutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
The marketing mix also known as the 4 p`s (product, place, price and promotion) is a huge tool used in the process of marketing.
This tool is used to mix the for p`s in order to get the desired response from the market and also to get the desired product that meets the demand of that market. This tool is easier un-derstood by an example of baking a cake, a cake contains sugar, flour, eggs and milk but what will make the cakes different mostly would be the amount of each ingredient put, and this is the same as the marketing mix.
Product: the product is basically the goods or service that the company offers to the targeted market, for most people product translates to a tangible item but a product can also be none tangible like a service offered.
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