The 4 A's of Marketing with Jagdish Sheth

This course focuses on how to make marketing both more efficient and effective. It advocates that the role of marketing is to create a win-win situation for both customers and marketers. Good marketing also requires taking a purpose-driven approach. Marketing also needs to broaden to more stakeholders aside from the customer. Therefore, it requires internal marketing, supplier marketing, community marketing, and investor marketing. This course also demonstrates that stakeholder marketing generates better financial performance for the marketer.

The most common framework in marketing is the 4Ps of Marketing (Price, Product, Place, and Promotion). However, this is a company perspective about marketing and the 4A’s of marketing is a customer perspective on marketing. Customers are looking for value and the 4A’s is a value creation framework. Each A has two dimensions. For instance, acceptability is functional and psychological. Affordability encapsulates the ability and willingness to pay, and accessibility focuses on availability and convenience. Lastly, awareness looks at product and brand knowledge.

The rise of emerging economies is bringing significant changes in the marketing practice. The traditional notion of extending products and services designed for advanced economies is no longer as successful in emerging markets. This is primarily because of affordability and accessibility. Moreover, most consumption in emerging markets is unbranded products and services, and unorganized competition. This course identifies five dimensions where emerging markets are different. The traditional approach of think global, act local (glocal) is replaced by a new perspective of think local, act global, especially in large emerging markets such as China and India.