MARKETING STRATEGY

 

               A strategy in general is a plan about how to get from one place to the other desired place. However, no plan can be developed without a proper preparation. First, a company has to realize where it is now and where does it want to go in the future. For management this means taking strategic decisions about the company‟s mission and the width of its domain (e.g. types of industries, product lines). Knowing the starting point and the final point allows a company to think about how to get there. The choice of the ways to get to the final point can be limited by financial and human resources and that is the reason why a company needs to know how to obtain and allocate its resources.                    

Another important factor of success of the plan is to know how a company will compete with its competitors and how it can position itself to get a sustainable advantage. Having the research done and the plan developed a company can start translating the plans into actions. To see if the plan is working well a company should control the results of the implementation in comparison with its plans and eventually make some corrections to the original plan.

The same approach is used in a strategic marketing process although it goes more into detail. A company allocates its marketing mix resources to reach its target markets.

This process consists of three main phases: the planning, implementation, and control phase. (For more information see picture nb. 1).

The strategic marketing process is formalized in a marketing plan that specifies all the marketing activities in a certain time frame (usually long term and annual periods) in order to reach the defined marketing goal, which must be consistent with other business goals of the company to improve the total performance. The marketing plan should be simple, to the point and respecting the design of the brand, product plan, market segment and geographical plan. It has to contain at minimum: situation analysis, marketing objectives and goals, marketing strategy (including the marketing mix and the marketing budget), marketing action plan and marketing controls. There are several types of marketing plans:

 

What If Jesus Had A Marketing Team?

Jesus was the greatest brand of his time. It’s just no one really realized it. 

Except (of course), his marketing team who were behind some of his best stunts, like changing water into wine, healing the blind, and the whole thing with feeding the multitude of people with a few loaves of bread. And all this with no media buying whatsoever!

In this video an ad agency imagines what it might’ve been like if Jesus had the slick media executives and creatives that brands have now. Creatives who suggest things like, “it might be beneficial if the Savior walks on water for his next trick”, which he’s naturally a little apprehensive about.  But he’s the Lord, he can do anything.

Jesus deliberates this latest stunt and says, “But if I die doing this, you’d better bring me back to life”.  After a dramatic pause the marketing team responds, “We can do that!” ….and the rest is history.

Watch Video:

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn0G2BfloZM[/embedyt]

A discovery by University of Sydney researchers could underpin a new class of implantable devices that provide biological signals to surrounding tissue for better integration with the body and reduced risk of infection.

Modern medicine increasingly relies on implantable biomedical devices but their effectiveness is often limited because of unsuccessful integration with host tissue or the development of untreatable infections, necessitating replacement of the device through revision surgery.

The team at the Applied Plasma Physics and Surface Engineering Laboratory has developed practical techniques to guide and attach peptides to surfaces; computer simulations and experiments demonstrated control of both peptide orientation and surface concentration, which can be achieved by applying an electric field like that delivered by a small household-sized battery.

The findings are published today in Nature Communications.

Corresponding author Professor of Applied Physics and Surface Engineering Marcela Bilek said biomaterial coatings can mask the implanted devices and mimic surrounding tissue.

“The holy grail is a surface that interacts seamlessly and naturally with host tissue through biomolecular signalling,” said Professor Bilek, who is a member of the University of Sydney Nano Institute and the Charles Perkins Centre.

Robust attachment of biological molecules to the bio-device surface is required to achieve this, as enabled by unique surface modification processes developed by Professor Bilek.

“Although proteins have successfully been used in a number of applications, they don’t always survive harsh sterilisation treatments — and introduce the risk of pathogen transfer due to their production in micro-organisms,” Professor Bilek said.

Professor Bilek — together with Dr Behnam Akhavan from the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering and the School of Physics and lead author PhD candidate, Lewis Martin from the School of Physics — are exploring the use of short protein segments called peptides that, when strategically designed, can recapitulate the function of the protein.

Mr Martin said the team was able to tune the orientation of extremely small biomolecules (less than 10 nanometres in size) on the surface. “We used specialised equipment to perform the experiments, but the electric fields could be applied by anyone using a home electronics kit,” he said.

Dr Akhavan said that assuming industry support and funding for clinical trials, improved implants could be available to patients within five years.

“The application of our approach ranges from bone-implants to cardiovascular stents and artificial blood vessels,” Dr Akhavan said.

“For the bone implantable devices, for example, such modern bio-compatible surfaces will directly benefit patients suffering from bone fracture, osteoporosis, and bone cancer.”

Because of their small size, the peptides can be produced synthetically and they are resilient during sterilisation. The main difficulty in using peptides is ensuring they are attached at appropriate densities and in orientations that effectively expose their active sites.

Using applied electric fields and buffer chemistry, the researchers discovered several new levers that control peptide attachment. Charge separation on peptides creates permanent dipole moments that can be aligned with an electric field to provide optimal orientation of the molecules and the amount of peptide immobilised can also be tuned by the electrostatic interactions when the peptides have an overall charge.

The paper said this knowledge is being used to design strategies to create a new generation of synthetic biomolecules.

“Our findings shed light on mechanisms of biomolecule immobilisation that are extremely important for the design of synthetic peptides and biofunctionalisation of advanced implantable materials,” the paper states.

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Sydney

Journal Reference:

  1. Lewis J. Martin, Behnam Akhavan, Marcela M. M. Bilek. Electric fields control the orientation of peptides irreversibly immobilized on radical-functionalized surfacesNature Communications, 2018; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02545-6

University of Sydney. “Implantable medical devices bolstered by next-gen surface modification: Synthetic peptides could integrate seamlessly with host tissue.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 24 January 2018. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180124111239.htm>.