What is Marketing?

موضوع: What is Marketing? الإثنين نوفمبر 01, 2010 6:24 am

What is Marketing?

[*]The term marketing has changed and evolved over a period of time, today marketing is based around providing continual benefits to the customer, these benefits will be provided and a transactional exchange will take place.
[*]The Chartered Institute of Marketing define marketing as ‘The management process responsible for identifying , anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitability’
[*]If we look at this definition in more detail Marketing is a management responsibility and should not be solely left to junior members of staff. Marketing requires co-ordination, planning, implementation of campaigns and a competent manager(s) with the appropriate skills to ensure success.
[*]Marketing objectives, goals and targets have to be monitored and met, competitor strategies analyzed, anticipated and exceeded. Through effective use of market and marketing research an organization should be able to identify the needs and wants of the customer and try to delivers benefits that will enhance or add to the customers lifestyle, while at the same time ensuring that the satisfaction of these needs results in a healthy turnover for the organization.
[*]Philip Kotler defines marketing as ‘satisfying needs and wants through an exchange process’
[*]Within this exchange transaction customers will only exchange what they value (money) if they feel that their needs are being fully satisfied, clearly the greater the benefit provided the higher transactional value an organization can charge.
[*]The marketing concept
[*]The concept of marketing has changed and evolved over time. Whilst in today’s business world, the customer is at the forefront, not all businesses in the past followed this concept. Their thinking, orientation or ideology put other factors rather then the customer first. Let us examine these below.
[*]Production Oriented: The focus of the business is not the needs of the customer, but of reducing costs by mass production. By reaching economies of scale the business will maximize profits by reducing costs.
[*]Product Orientation: The company believes that they have a superior product, based on quality and features, and because of this they feel their customers will like it also.
[*]Sales Orientation: The focus here is to make the product, and then try to sell it to the target market. However, the problem could be that consumers do not like what is being sold to them.
[*]Market Orientation: Puts the customer at the heart of the business. The organization tries to understand the needs of the customers by using appropriate research methods, Appropriate processes are developed to make sure information from customers is fed back into the heart of the organization. In essence all activities in the organization are based around the customer. The customer is truly king!
[*]In today’s competitive world putting the customer at the heart of the operation is strategically important. Whilst some organizations in certain industries may follow anything other then the market orientation concept, those that follow the market orientation concept have a greater chance of being successful