Essentials of Business Functions to Create Strong Customer Focus

TASK 1

1.1. Introduction to marketing along with current and future trends

Nowadays marketing trends are changing very fast. McDonald's earlier use do advertisement through television but now they are using social media for their product promotions. Moreover, they prefer to do distribution through online stores. Marketing is process of converting consumer needs intro revenue. Marketing helps companies in building their brand and influencing consumers to choose their brand over others (Jobber and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012). It is an ongoing management process that focuses on development of the products for the company, along with determining its price, promotional and distribution strategies.

The current trends of marketing of McDonald's include:

• Social Media: The firm has adopted the concept of customer-based marketing. It is establishing a communication with customers through social media. Such trends helps to establish long term relations with the buyers and help the firm rectify its errors through instant feedbacks (Malhotra, Birks and Wills, 2013).
  
  
• Faster Payment: McDonald's is currently focusing on convenience of the customers. To establish this, it provides facilities like payments through smartphones and various other NFC technologies which ease the customer's process of paying for their food. Through effective marketing campaigns, McDonald's provide such information to its customers.

However, marketing trends of the future are focusing more upon technological advancements and precision. These trends include:

• Authentic storytelling: Modern day customers are self-directed. These consumers are seeking more personalized experiences with organisations as big as McDonald's. The future marketing strategies of the firm should provide the customers with something other than simple promotion of their product. Cohesive marketing campaigns should be scaled out and the focus should be telling a story that is authentic, connecting the customers with the company in real-time.
  
  
• AI Integration: Artificial Intelligence is the future. It has already created a strong impact on the world. More organisations are inclining towards AI for their marketing campaigns. McDonald's should also adopt this trend as it would give the firm more competitive advantage over other organisations.

1.2. An overview of different marketing processes

There is a specific process of marketing used by McDonald's to create a strong customer base, which is:

• Detailed and thorough market research identifying opportunities and threats.
• Study of the strategies used by its competitors.
• Setting up of new policies that are customer oriented.
• Critical evaluation of these formulated strategies and policies (McDonald and Wilson, 2016).

1.3.Roles and responsibilities of a marketing manager

Marketing manager is responsible to manage the marketing resources of a business organisation. The success of a new product and increasing sales figure of the existing ones heavily depend on this entity (Nagle and Müller, 2017). Marketing manager of McDonald's is responsible for developing a unique and long lasting brand image in front of its customers. The roles and responsibilities of marketing manager of McDonald's are as follows:

• Customer Relationship: The marketing manager is responsible for establishing a strong customer relationship. This is achieved through conveying the customers' preferences to the company which is gathered through detailed surveys and online questionnaires.
  
  
• Employee Management: The responsibilities of all the employees of marketing department lies with the marketing manager. He provides them with efficient marketing resources and monitors their work performance. He is also responsible for deciding their incentives and increments.
  
  
• Marketing Strategies: The competitiveness of a company depends upon their effective marketing strategies. Marketing manager is responsible towards developing these strategies which helps to create a stronger brand image and increase in profits.
  
  
• Marketing Opportunities: The trends of the market are thoroughly analysed by the marketing managers of McDonald's. Along with this, they identify new markets in which the company could sell their food items. They also strictly monitor consumer patterns which helps the company to keep a consistent sales figure even in off-peak intervals of their products.

1.4 Interrelationship of marketing department with other functional departments of McDonald’s

It is very essentials for any organisation to organize and coordinate plans of different functional departments in order to attain desired goals and objectives. In McDonald's most of the assimilation takes place after the development and implementation of business plan. It is important to evaluate and coordinate business plans as all the departments are interlinked with each other and effect each other. The impact of business development plan on customers is evaluated by each department of the organisation. The interrelation of marketing department with other functional department of McDonald's are discussed below:

• Marketing and Research & Development: Research and surveys conducted by the research and development department of a company helps marketing in many ways. R&D department of an organisation plays crucial role in generating new creative and innovative ideas for future product developments. In context with McDonald's, research and development department conducted a survey and identified that most of India's population is vegetarian. This survey via R&D department of McDonald's helps the organisation to develop and incorporate some changes in vegetarian hamburgers. Now this new developed vegetarian hamburgers by McDonald's has high market share in the Indian market since many years.
  
  
• Marketing and Human resources: Human resources departments deals with recruitments, selection and training process. They are responsible for identifying and giving best possible employees and workers to their organisation (Aswathappa, 2013). Moreover, HR departments also undertakes enhancement and appraisal of every employee’s performance. In context to McDonald's, if marketing managers of McDonald's wants to hire some employees who can work in fields, the HR department plays important role in this situation they would help them in finding out candidate profile, advertising required for the job and job descriptions. Moreover, human resource department will provide effective training after hiring so that they gain some effective knowledge to work and perform well in market.
  
  
• Marketing and Production: Production department identifies the type and number of products that is to be marketed, marketing department evaluates sales forecast for every product line. The interrelation between production and marketing evident when new products are developed. For instance, if McDonald’s wants to develop a new line of their chicken burgers, its design and production facilities will be based on the market research which would include the demand for a new product.

1.5 Importance of marketing role

Marketing plays important role as the success of any organisation is directly based upon its effective practices and implementation of marketing strategies. McDonald's is well acknowledged about the importance of marketing due to this it keeps on developing news ideas and find out effective ways of marketing. McDonald's has used an innovative marketing strategy by introducing their prime mascot, Ronald McDonald to attract kids as well as teenagers towards buying their products. Moreover, marketing strategy followed by McDonald's helps them to raise the standard of living of their consumers by serving cost effective and quality products. Effective marketing of its products has helped the organization in increasing its sales by adding value to its products (Martell, D.A., 2018).

1.6 Significance of having effective interrelationships between different functional departments

In order to achieve goals and objectives of organisation it is crucial to have proper coordination of the activities of various functional departments. There is need of proper designing and implementation of market research, market planning to make future marketing decisions. The interrelationship with different functional departments allows marketing to come up with new creative and innovative ideas that will help in development of products. Good coordination of marketing with other departments enable to gain better surveys for marketing the products. It is important for a company like McDonald’s to establish coordination between its different functional departments.

TASK 2

2.1. Use of elements of marketing mix by organizations to achieve overall business objectives:

Marketing research of McDonald's deals with systematic and objective identification , collection, analysis and dissemination of customers taste and location. They conduct research to find out the taste of their customers and develop their food and services according to their taste. The main marketing objective of McDonald's is serve good food services for great value in return. STP analysis for McDonald's are as follows:

• Segmentation: McDonald's use to make products for people of different ages and has different prices lines which includes low as well as high incomes as well. While having a franchise McDonald's has analysed the cultural and religious atmosphere of different country and then prepared the menu.
  
  
• Target: McDonald's used to target kids, teenagers and families for marketing their products in the market.
  
  
• Positioning: As McDonald's performance is outstanding from initial times, they had developed a unique image in the mind of customers. They keep on developing alternative positioning strategy for different target markets in comparison to other competitors.

Marketing mix is one of basic element of marketing that an organisation uses to attain their marketing goals and objectives. These elements includes 7 P's that is place, price, promotion, people, place and physical. McDonald's has being working with its effective marketing mix to gain competitive advantage. Moreover, it keeps making changes in marketing strategies according to demand and preference of customers. Different organisation uses different marketing mix to give competition to each other. Comparison between marketing mix of McDonald's and Burger King are discussed below:

TASK 3

3.1. Produce and evaluate a basic marketing plan for the organisation

Marketing Plan:

Following is the marketing plan for McPasta, which is a unique recipe invented by the extremely talented team of world class chefs of McDonald's. The marketing strategy will include aggressive advertising in the UK focusing on the unique blend of flavours and innovative presentation of this dish(Blakeman, 2018).

Company Overview:

Incorporated in 1955. McDonald's is a global leader of the food service organisations. The company operates in six continents with more than 37,000 restaurants active all around the world. Moreover, the firm has unmatched competencies in real estate, restaurant operations, marketing, retailing and franchising. McDonald's also a leader in regards to Corporate Social Responsibilities.

Mission and Vision:

• Vision: The vision of McDonald's through McPasta is to reinvent uniqueness of the taste of its products and attract more attention from UK customers who prefer taste of the food over every other element.
• Mission: The mission of this company is to attain maximum customer satisfaction through its exceptional service quality, hygienic environment, affordable pricing and most importantly through more inclination towards its Corporate Social Responsibilities.

Strategic Objective:

McDonald's aims to achieve 5% increase in its customer base in a period of 6 months following the sale of McPasta. The firm would use aggressive promotional strategies through compelling TV advertisements and online marketing to attract more customers in UK (Chernev, 2018).

Products and Services:

As the biggest name in fast-food outlets of United Kingdom, McDonald's provide a huge variety of food items like hamburgers, cheeseburgers, breakfast sandwiches, salads, egg muffins, wraps, chicken nuggets, French fries and soft drinks. The services provided by the company are providing a space for parties and celebrations, visual and musical entertainment, Wi-Fi and arch cards.

Market Research:

The marketing team of McDonald's is responsible for conducting a detailed research of customer trends in UK. This includes their preferences in tastes, food presentations, current satisfaction level of the customers, and changes required in business operations. A thorough market research was conducted which set a base for the development of McPasta (Burns, Bush and Sinha, 2014).

Target Market:

This refers to potential group of customers most likely to purchase McDonald's products. Since the possibility of them buying the firm's products is high, the company implements its effective market strategies to gain their attention(Tanner and Raymond, 2015). For McPunch, segmentation, targeting and positioning is used to determine the target market:

• Segmentation: Under this, the market is divided into certain groups depending on certain characteristics which are as follows:
• Geographic: This segment considers the geographical locations of the customers. For McPasta, UK has been chosen as a potential market.
• Demographic: Breakdown in this factor is on the basis of combinations of age, gender, marital status, education etc. General populations above the age 10 belonging to any social class has been chosen for McPasta,
• Lifestyle: This segment deals with hobbies, entertainment and other non-work time pursuits. General population who loves to eat quality foods acts as a segment for the product.
• Behavioural: This focuses on the behaviour of individuals, for instance, their nature towards buying food items, brand loyalty, different usage levels, etc. Since the firm wants to attract more customers, a segment of potential loyal customers is created.
• Targeting: This part of the process deals with targeting a specific segment which the company feels fit to boost up the sales of its products. However, with different business environmental needs, the constitution of target market needs constant changes. Targeting a potential market can be a potential factor for success of McPasta. All the general public above 12 and below 60 will be targeted by the firm for this product (Möller, K. and Parvinen, P., 2015).
• Positioning: This is the last step of this process, and aims at developing the most effective positioning strategy for the product. There is consistent demand for innovative products like McPasta, the curiosity for such items is very high and company outlets are the most feasible options for placing this product(Gengler and Mulvey, 2017).

Marketing Mix:

Marketing mix is referred to the combination of 7 p's of marketing: product, price, place, promotion, people, process and physical evidence. The marketing team of McDonald's will have to use a perfect blend of these elements to effectively sell a product like McPasta and develop a stronger customer base in UK.

Marketing Budget:

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CONCLUSION

The above assignment concludes that marketing is the most essential factor in driving organisations towards success. It is vital for the marketing managers of McDonald's to use efficient marketing strategies to achieve better business outcomes. The marketing department interrelates with other functional departments and is dependant towards these for formulating the best marketing strategies for the firm. Different organisations use elements of marketing mix differently depending on their marketing strategies to attract potential buyers. Lastly, it is crucial for a company like McDonald's to develop a detail marketing plan which helps it achieve its objectives regarding the new product they wish to launch.

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