Industry specific marketing e.g. Retail Marketing

This post is in response to a student's question on whether retail marketing was different from marketing. As explained in the earlier two posts, where we defined marketing and expanded on the marketing act, marketing is an essential, strategic if not the most important function of any business as this blogger claims. Marketing foundational concepts and how we approach it are the same across all industries. Any good learning plan for yourself in marketing should cover all the basic tenets of the discipline which can be used across industries.

An industry is characterized by commonalities in the customer demographics, buying behavior, product categories and what needs they address, the value transformation process typically followed etc. Retail is an example of an industry. Within an industry, there could be finer segmentation e.g. grocery (Spencers), apparel (SVS), departmental (Lifestyle), product category specific (Croma), branded stores (Nike) etc. Other examples of industries are Automobile manufacturing, Auto ancillary manufacturing, Financial Services, Healthcare, Professional Services, Information & Communication Technology (ICT) etc.

With that background industry specific marketing is a no brainer. It is marketing as applied to a specific industry, where the practictioner has or develops a deep understanding of its customers, their buying behavior, the industry's value chain, levers of growth and profitability, various business models that the industry operates in, current market players etc. For example, in retailing, individual consumers or families are the focal point as end users. Factors and processes such as location, product delivery, store layout and ambience, merchandizing, buying, industry practices in terms of credit, returns and exchanges all are unique to the industry and need to be known to be a good marketer in that industry. I hope this helps students trying to distinguish between marketing in general and industry specific marketing, especially in India, where courses are now being offered e.g. in Retail Marketing or Insurance Marketing versus a MBA in Marketing. We will dwell on more nuances and differences in later posts.