Marketing Essay

Introduction

Marketing is a consumer-driven enterprise whose success is hinged on identifying the needs of market participants while adroitly maneuvering the marketing environment. An organization’s ability to connect with customers is incumbent on looking beyond internal aspirations, and into the marketplace with the shifting needs and desires of consumers mediating marketing opportunities.

A successful market strategy requires execution in three key areas: segmentation, targeting, and positioning. Segmentation involves discerning the unique needs of market participants while targeting includes identifying the specific market segments that the company’s product offering can satisfy in a superior way. Once segmentation and targeting are complete, the marketing strategy is further focused to position the product offering in the minds of target consumers. Positioning is essential as it clarifies the core product promise and identifies how the product uniquely satisfies the particular goal(s) of the target market; steps that are integral in pinpointing the customer-focused value proposition, or the cogent reason compelling the target market to purchase the product.

Sales Goals

The estimation of sales goals is an important step in the marketing process as it requires distilling what the organization wishes to accomplish by customer consumption. General Motors has spent close to two billion dollars on research and development for the hydrogen fuel cell; an investment that must be recouped over the life cycle of the product. Albeit important, recovery of research and development dollars is not the sole sales goal for the organization. General Motors also needs to create a product offering that creates immediate and future value for consumers to gain a strong foothold in the overall and hydrogen-fuel cell automotive market that remains strong into the future. To achieve investment recapture as well as market capture General Motors needs to deploy strategies that will balance profit generation and market penetration. The existing profit centers for General Motors as well as consumer buying trends are considered to determine the best course of action for achieving the two sales goals.

The largest profit centers for General Motors lie in their full-size Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) and truck product offerings. The 2015 Chevy Tahoe, which retails for around $50,000, yields a profit of around $15,000 compared with profits for small sedans, like the Chevy Malibu, which hover around $2,000. This is particularly salient because Tahoe sales in the first quarter of 2015 jumped 33% from 2014 figures. The profitability of the Tahoe is consistent with other large SUVs within GM’s product offering including the Chevy Suburban, Cadillac Escalade, and GMC Yukon and Yukon XL. In 2014 Sport Utility Vehicles