Marketers work basically in a boundary spanning environment. between the internal and external aspects of the organisation

Marketing as value creation processes:

• Managing the sales force
• coordinating the advertising and marketing comms
• gathering and disseminating market intelligence
• developing new products and services
• Input into strategic planning process

Key success factors in marketing management include:

• team working
• Client Management
• relationship development skills

The Marketing Imagination, in practical terms can be defined as a function of management. But for this to be used most effectively, it is important that this is a concern for all levels of management - especially senior management.

Example from advert for marketing manager role. Skills listed by importance:
leadership and motivational skills
creativity and great attention to detail
excellent communication and IT skills
budgeting and project management skills

Marketing speak, or 'Discourse' often transforms the expectations that people have of organisations

Unhelpful actions include:
Making jokes to colleagues about difficult customers
Maintaining a list of difficult customers to share with new staff

Helpful actions include:
Sharing customer feedback across the organisation
Ensuring colleagues outside the marketing team meet customers

Performing marketing discourse well has tangible benefits. When marketing management is handled well, customers respond accordingly

It is helpful to think of marketing management
as both a practice (actions and events), a discipline (or body of knowledge) and a set of discourses (ways of talking and representing the world).

Organisations now have access to a plethora of marketing intelligence:
Internal:

• Databases and processes
• sales data
• Customer feedback
• inventory
• Customer behavioural data
• insight from personnel and partners
  
  

Ethical considerations:

• Legislative, eg Data Protection or consent
  
  

Bad practice makes effective marketing difficult, for example data security breaches or unscrupulous sales tactics

The organisation must have an understanding of the priorities:

• Internal capabilities
• Evaluating and monitoring external macro environment
• An effective system to draw marketing intelligence

Improvements in tech allow for greater customisation. It also allows for more covert intelligence such as smartphones monitoring conversations to affect advertising or in store movements

STP _ Segmentation, Targetting and Positioning.
For example, retail supermarkets where the offering varies -price, experience or quality, as does the pricing for near identical products
Although segmentation is often seen in this light, other factors come into play such as demographics, although these are not effective in capturing identity.
The segment that the retailer chooses to serve is the target market(s).
The final STP is to position the product in relation to competitor products.