Tuesday 21 June 2011

What Is Marketing?

What Is Marketing?


The shortest possible definition of marketing is “meeting the needs profitably”. In strict terms marketing can be defined as an organizational function and set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering the value to the customers and managing the customer relationships in a way that generate benefits for the organization as well as its stakeholders.

Marketing is a very complicated process, so a separate field of management known as “marketing management” specifically focuses on this aspect of business. Marketing management is the art and science of choosing the target markets and getting, keeping and developing customers in those potential markets through creating, communicating and delivering the value to the customers.

Marketing Vs Selling

Marketing should never be seen as “art of selling”. Selling is a very small segment of the whole marketing process. The aim of selling is just to sell the product or service. But the aim of marketing is to know and understand the needs of the customer; and then providing the product or service to him according to his specific needs. So, in marketing, the product or service sells itself.

Marketer and prospects

A marketer is someone who seeks response (attention, a purchase, a vote, a donation) from another party. in the marketing process, the other party will be termed as prospect for the marketer. If two parties are selling something to each other then both will be termed as marketers.

The market

The market is a wide clearing house, where sellers and buyers come in contact with each other and then interact at mutually acceptable prices in order to conduct a business transaction with each other. Sellers sell the product or service to buyers and the buyers purchase it from the sellers at mutually acceptable prices. A point at which interaction takes place between the buyer and seller is known as the point of equilibrium, at this point demand and supply forces of market balance each other. A market is present wherever the buyers are present.

What can be marketed?

Now the question arises what can be marketed in the actual world? Marketers can market entities like goods, services, experience, events, people (celebrities), place, property, organizations, information and ideas.

Customer-oriented marketing process

The aims of customer-oriented marketing process is-

1. Satisfying the needs of the customers

2. Giving full importance to the customers

3. Providing product and service to the customers specifically according to their needs

Traditional marketing process was focused on fulfilling the customer satisfaction (i.e. meeting the customer’s expectations) but modern marketing focuses on customer delight i.e. providing more than the expectations of the customer.

Competition-oriented marketing process
MarketingAll intelligent business keeps a sharp eye on the marketing strategies of their competitors. This helps them in formulating their own marketing policy. This is known as competition-oriented marketing process.

Environment-oriented marketing process

Under this approach, organizations formulate their marketing strategy after analysing-

1. Internal environment

2. External environment

3. Society

4. Local systems of business

5. Political system

6. Legal system

Different organizations adopt different approach for formulating their specific marketing strategy.

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