The dissertation is devoted to the development of the theoretical and methodological basis and instruments of improving sales activities of the agricultural machinery companies based on consolidated marketing.
Consolidated marketing proposed to define as activity of several one-branch technologically connected companies for joint creation of the consumer value chain for the promotion, sale of goods and services, management of customer relations through the coordination center, which implements an integrated marketing and sales policy from all participating companies. In the thesis, the system of principles was developed.
The author justified that excluding the traditional marketing tasks the consolidated marketing should provide the specific tasks as follows: a common, clearly formulated and consistent strategy for integrating the marketing communications system; ensuring optimization and transparency of budgets of marketing programs; optimization of internal information flows; promotion of products in a single market space for the benefit of all participants, without allocating subjective preferences for segmental market topology.
The prerequisites for forming a consolidated marketing structure are a high level of competition between product manufacturers, a low level of marketing and marketing costs, a low level of the company's willingness to increase these costs, and the presence of products at the stage of saturation. In the thesis the author justified that the using of consolidated marketing structure allow to obtain the higher level of efficiency, than isolated and separated marketing program by each company in the framework that the additional costs of that structure less than the cost of delegation, the ability of an entity to provide financing for the isolated marketing or sales marketing are limited, the process of financing these events generates revenue that exceeds the equilibrium return on investment in the investment market and the cost of delegation of powers, the amount of marketing activities offered is sufficient to ensure their diversification.
The authors empirically proved that the Ukrainian agricultural machinery produced by domestic companies was at the stage of "saturation", which was characterized by low values of product sales, increasing competitive pressure from foreign producers, who were actively entering the Ukrainian market. The basic components of the marketing mix strategy at this stage have been developed. It was substantiated that at this stage it was expedient to introduce a model of consolidated sales in existing markets, to implement a consolidated marketing policy for entering new markets, to organize sales through the creation of integration structures, to use the method of creating value chains.
The new type of integration connections was proposed by allocating – contract group KM as long-term voluntary association of several single-sector technologically linked enterprises that retain legal independence and functional autonomy in all areas except marketing and sales, for the integrated implementation of which form a separate business unit with a joint budget managed from a single coordination center realizes on behalf of all participating companies the task of cumulative impact on market infrastructure, provides the possibility to transfer of mutual sales obligations and guarantees within the association. The forecasting of sales volume of the agricultural machinery companies which integrated all forces in the contract group of consolidated marketing, proposed to do it considering the elasticity of products’ demand, changes in the sales volume of products due to the entry of the company into the contract group and the effectiveness of the group’s activity.
The findings of the survey of 57 agricultural machinery companies in Ukrain allowed allocating the 11 of the most important issues in the sales activities which were structured on the level of influence on reducing the sales performance of products, as well as the level of controllability. On this basis, the interference of their profiles within the two-factor matrix was performed, which formed the basis for determining strategies for their control and analysis.
In the thesis econometric model which based on the stochastic frontal analysis (using the trans logarithmic cost function with the specification of the Battese and Coelli model) was developed, which allows to determine what share of the return on the investment in production, marketing and sales were received by companies compared to the level that could be achieved in terms of market conditions and considering the conditions for conducting marketing activities in the field of agricultural machinery.
Nonlinear econometric models were developed to formalize the dependence of marketing and sales costs on the size of annual turnover in using the least-squares method.
