MARKETING AND SALES

Marketing and Sales

Marketing and Sales

Introduction

Marketing strategies also known as business strategies are the set of activities planned to achieve objectives related to marketing and sales of any particular product. There are different marketing objectives which change with respect to organizations, but the main objectives of any marketing strategy include: to attract more customers, boost sales, highlight / launch new products and display of products, etc. The design of marketing strategies is a function of marketing. To design marketing strategies a company should initially determine its target market or potential customers; base on this analysis, company should formulate its strategies that can take care of the needs and wishes of the customers. But in designing marketing strategies, companies must also take account the competition (e.g. develop strategies that capitalize on the weaknesses of the competitors, or strategies should be based on the best practices), and other factors such as the ability of the company to invest capital, or operational capacity etc. In this paper, the marketing strategies followed by British Heart Foundation (BHF) will be investigated and evaluated in order to assess the effectiveness of the marketing strategies as well as to find out how their marketing strategies affecting their sales (Hekansson & Waluszewski, 2002).

British Heart Foundation

British Heart Foundation is a charitable organization, working on a vision to create a world where not a single person would die by heart disease. The organization was founded on 1961 by a group of medical and healthcare professionals to fund additional research into the diagnosis, treatment, causes, and prevention of circulatory and heart disease. The organization is run by a board of trustees who voluntarily spend their time in the organizational activities to turn the vision on the reality. The organization claims that pursuing the vision of the founders BHF has got remarkable success. The aim of the company is to prevent the serious death cause, which is the heart and circulatory diseases. It is pertinent to understand the main strategy of the organization to understand on what grounds the organization has formulated its marketing strategy. The strategic objectives of BHF include:

To become the pioneer in research for finding the causes of heart diseases; for prevention, better diagnosis and treatment of the heart diseases;

To increases awareness among the general public to reduce the self-made risk to heart;

To influence the government to make such policies that will minimize the causes of heart diseases;

To aid in the attainment of best possible standards for support and care of heart patients; and

To minimize inequalities in care services provided for heart diseases all over UK. (British Heart Foundation, 2011)

As BHF is a charitable organization than the term sales in this assignment will refer to donation the organization receives, because BHF is the non-profit organization. The above discussion explicitly states that the main objectives of the organization's marketing strategy are to promote a superior image of the organization so that more and more people will donate to the organization. First of all in this study, ...