Ketan Shivarkar

Roll No: 1549 | E-Mail: ketan.shivarkar@gmail.com

What are the various elements of marketing mix?

I work for Cisco Systems, for a business unit (Solution factory), which is primarily into building innovative products and solutions. These offerings are delivered in an appliance offering, which results into sale of lots of other cisco peripheral products resulting in a profitable proposition. Product Cisco has a portfolio offering products, services and solutions to the customers. The products are offered in the following range of areas: Network Infrastructure Collaboration Products & Services Cloud and Data Centre Enterprise Solutions Video and Voice

Cisco has traditionally been a dominant force in the Network domain and is the market leader in the segment. It has a wide range of product offering from high-end switches and routers to handle phenomenal network traffic to home wireless hubs for consumers. Within the enterprise offering it has a product to each and every need. This wide array of offerings combined with the best in industry services and support has resulted in Cisco being a market leader in this segment. Cisco has traditionally been a company to sense early the market and the customer need trends and has thus invested in research development in prospective areas, which would generate higher profits and harness more opportunities.

Price Price is a sensitive area for any technology house to ensure the value being provided to the user/enterprise is resonant. Considering the competitor product pricing strategies and the product value proposition Cisco continually prices its offering to benefit from the cost advantage point. Since Cisco has been the pioneers and the early entrants in the networking technological field, the RnD over the years have paid off and many of the Cisco products are cash cows allowing Cisco to invest heavily in newer opportunities. With the advent of newer markets Cisco has been successful in providing value to the price sensitive markets. Cisco also has a Cisco Finance division, which finances the customers for purchases made. This also includes payments with periodic interval.

Place Cisco has a wide sales force, which spans the globe in different areas of customer points. The customer points can be different industries as manufacturing, data houses, technology houses services; also the other points of sale are Governments and retails customers. In areas where Cisco does not have a significant presence, Cisco is know to collaborate and establish partner to work closely with customers.

Promotion Cisco was conservative with promotion during early years, but as markets matured and there was advent of competition, promotional spending and spending for brand building was increased. Cisco strategized to grow with customers, hence customers acted as the promotion use cases to the market. Apart from advertising, Cisco adopted promotion channels like

Technology meets White papers Trade shows Customer value chain and cost-benefit analysis Partner/Sales/marketing interfaces to the customer

Are they consistent with one another?

The value provided by the product and the services offerings are consistent to the vision statement. The vision is for offering end-to-end solution to the customer and lesser cost of ownership.

Do the elements add up to a harmonious integrated whole?

Cisco has a sizable presence in the product development, services and sales, where ever there is a shortcoming the gaps are filled by continual look-out for acquisition possibilities and by collaboration with partner to meet collective goals.

Is each element being used to its best leverage?

Not always. The fact is that Cisco is not number 1 or 2 in some of the product areas e.g. server markets, storage networks. Earlier Cisco used to partner with HP with the same, but now for strategic reasons markets its own brand of servers. But overall, I would conclude that having a range of products and services helps Cisco to be a strong player in the service provider market.

Does this total program, as well as each element, meet the needs of carefully and explicitly defined target market segment?
Cisco has several products build and positioned for different target markets. The broad target markets being enterprises, banking and financial systems, government research facilities and utilities and also the retail consumer market. Every product/service/solution is developed considering the need and demand for the market for the offering. Cisco has market segmentation based on geographies too, for e.g. EMAE, AsiaPac, America, and Europe.

Does the marketing mix build on organization's culture and core competencies? Does it avoid weaknesses or imply clear program to correct them?
Yes it does. At every point Cisco makes a decision on buy vs build vs partner evaluation to monetize the opportunities and weed out the competition.

Does the marketing mix create distinctive personality in the competitive marketplace and protect the company from strongest competitor?
The marketing mix is not static. The strongest competitor is also not static. E.g. Huwaei is current strongest competitor of cisco. Earlier, it was Ericsson, Alcatel, Juniper who were Ciscos strongest competitor few years back. Changing market conditions and evolving competitors puts emphasis on having marketing strategies and ability to execute the same. One of the good parts of Ciscos marketing mix is that it is able to identify the strongest competitor well enough in time and is able to counter the threat.