Marketing
Identifying and understanding customers, market research and segmentation, and the elements of the marketing mix.
Learn
Marketing, explained point by point
Everything the GCSE specification expects you to be able to do, and how to actually do it - the same lesson a signed-in student studies from.
Explain how businesses identify and understand customers
Everything in marketing starts with knowing who the customer is and what they want - needs like price, quality, choice and convenience. Get it right and products sell; guess and the business makes things nobody buys. Businesses build this understanding from sales data, feedback, loyalty-card records and market research. In case-study answers, begin by asking who this business's customers actually are - teenagers buying trainers want different things from retired gardeners.
Compare methods of market research - primary and secondary, qualitative and quantitative
Primary research collects new data first-hand - surveys, interviews, focus groups, observation: tailored and current, but slow and costly. Secondary research uses existing data - government statistics, market reports, competitors' websites: quick and cheap, but general and possibly dated. Quantitative data is numbers (how many, how often) - easy to graph and compare; qualitative data is opinions and reasons (why) - rich but harder to summarise. Reliability caveat worth one evaluation mark: a sample of 10 friends proves very little.
Explain market segmentation
Segmentation splits a market into groups who share characteristics - by age, gender, income, location or lifestyle - so marketing can aim at the right people instead of everyone. A gym might target 18–30 professionals with an app-based offer and retirees with daytime classes: same gym, different segments, different marketing mix for each. Targeted marketing spends the budget where it works; untargeted marketing pays to reach people who will never buy.
Explain product and price decisions in the marketing mix
Product covers design, features, quality and the product life cycle - launch, growth, maturity, decline - with extension strategies (new flavours, redesigns, new markets) to stretch maturity out. Price must fit the product and the customer: penetration pricing starts low to win users; skimming starts high for something new and desirable; competitive pricing matches rivals; cost-plus adds a margin to unit cost. A price says something about the product - a luxury brand priced cheaply confuses its own customers.
Explain promotion and place, and how the 4Ps work together
Promotion is how customers hear about the product - advertising, social media, sales promotions like discounts and free samples, sponsorship and PR - chosen to fit the audience and the budget. Place is how the product reaches customers: shops, direct delivery, e-commerce. The 4Ps must reinforce each other: a premium product with a high price wants stylish promotion and exclusive stockists - sell it in a discount store and the mix contradicts itself. Integrated-mix judgements like that are top-band material.
Use marketing data accurately, and evaluate marketing decisions
Marketing questions often carry data - market share percentages, survey results, sales trends. Read it carefully, quote it in your answer, and show any calculation with working (a market of £2m and sales of £300,000 means a 15% share: 300,000 ÷ 2,000,000 × 100 - write the steps, because working earns marks even if a slip creeps in). For evaluate questions - "Should the café advertise on social media?" - argue both sides in the café's context, then recommend, with the deciding factor stated: its customers, its budget, its competition.
Practice
Try a Marketing question
A GCSE-style original task from this topic. Sketch a quick plan of your own before you open what a strong answer covers.
Read the following case study. IronOak Gyms is planning to open a new gym and surveyed 200 local people, asking which single factor matters most to them when choosing a gym. The results are shown in Figure 2. (a) Using Figure 2, calculate the percentage of people surveyed who chose price as the most important factor. Show your working. [2 marks] (b) State which factor was chosen by 40 people. [1 mark] [3 marks]
Show what a strong answer covers
The marking points an examiner looks for. Not a model answer - a checklist to plan against.
- AO2: reads from Figure 2 that 80 of the 200 people chose price, and shows the method 80 ÷ 200 × 100
- AO2: gives the answer 40%
- AO2: states that equipment was the factor chosen by 40 people