Marketing Essay Tips: The Five Writing Rules for Marketing

The marketing essay differs from standard business essays in several key areas. A successful marketing essay combines rigorous business acumen with proper business writing format as well as effective analysis of the sociological elements of business such as consumer behavior.

If you have been assigned a marketing essay, considered the following top 10 tips while you write:

1. Begin your essay with a brief but clear delineation of the industry that your topic discusses, before you get into the meat of the essay. Define the industry and highlight the scope of what you intend to cover within that industry. For example, if your topic is the strategic difference in brand management between Dell, Toshiba, and Acer laptops, take the first part of the essay to describe the particulars of the laptop PC industry.
2. Include a section early in your essay for marketing that details the macro business forces that have an impact on your marketing topic or area of marketing research. Marketing essays benefit when the writer places them in a specific business context. One of the easiest and most effective ways to gauge the macro forces is to include an overview of Porter’s five forces that are at play in your area of research and clarify how they affect the topic.
3. Clarify what marketing mix the companies you write about employ and specify why and how the marketing mix succeeds. Essays for marketing need not spend a great deal of time on this aspect, except if the marketing mix has changed recently. If that is the case, include a brief analysis why and highlight ways in which the new marketing mix succeeds where the old one failed.
4. Keep the tables and statistics that you use to a minimum. The targeted use of tables and statistics represents an important element of marketing essays, as they allow your reader to locate key information such as market position. However, too many tables send the message that the writer lacks analysis, which will result in lower marks.
5. Find the balance in language between sociology and business. Marketing essays succeed when they display sharp business analysis through a technical yet colorful writing style that supports the social and psychological elements of marketing such as brand awareness and brand loyalty.