USE MARKETING TOOLS EFFECTIVELY (PAGE 25, JUNE 7, 2010)

THE Head of Marketing of Unilever Group of Companies, Mr Akofa Ata, has called on corporate organisations to use social communication tools such as twitter and facebook to reach out to customers.
He stressed that it was not shameful for marketing branches of companies to resort to social communication tools to communicate with their customers in order to understand them and model products that would meet their desire.
He explained that marketing branches that ignored the power of Information, Communication and Technology and all its tools for reaching customers were doing more harm than good to themselves and their companies.
Speaking on the topic: “How to Get to Grips with Your Competitors” as part of the series of educational lectures instituted by the Chartered Institute of Marketing Ghana (CIMG), Mr Ata said marketers could not function any more in the information economy without knowing the use of social communication tools and applying them in their work.
He also urged companies to invest heavily in advertising and make their goods affordable to attract customers to their products.
He said this could lead their competitors to incur losses because their goods would be priced costly and would drive customers away to those that were affordable.
He said any company which was a leader in a certain segment of the market must not wait for competitors to make inroads into that segment before preparing catch-up and follow-up strategies to fend off the competitors, since that would not work out satisfactorily and it could led to the company losing the fight.
Mr Ata therefore advised companies with a market lead not to play with their competitors but to hit them hard through strategies so that they would not be able to withstand the competition from the onset.
He explained that they could win the competition when they leveraged their strength as soon as they spotted a competitor.
Mrs Josephine Okutu, President of CIMG, said the topics for the educational series were carefully chosen to reflect exactly on what was happening in the business front, as well as in the market place.
She urged corporate organisations to allow their staff, especially those in the marketing branches, to partake in the educational series, since it would impact positively on their organisations.