Marketing

What is Marketing?

Marketing is the term used to describe collectively those business functions most directly concerned with the demand stimulating and demand–fulfilling activities of the business enterprise.

In other words, Marketing is the process of discovering and translating consumer needs and wants into product and service specifications, creating demand for these products and services and then in turn expanding this demand.

Marketing is critically important for any organisation because understanding and responding to customer needs is a prerequisite for any organization success. The success of the organisation depends upon the marketing.

Marketing management today is the most important function in a commercial and business enterprise. The marketing department in an organisation promotes business and drive sales of its product or services.


Definition of Marketing

Followings are the various definition of marketing given by various authors:

According to Ben M.En “Marketing management is the process of increasing the effectiveness/efficiency by which marketing activities are performed by individuals or organizations.”

According to Philip Kotler: Marketing is defined as “a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others”.

American Marketing Association defines Marketing as “the performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from producers to customer or user.”

American Marketing Association redefined it as: “Marketing is an organisational function and set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in a way that benefit the organisation and its stakeholder”.


Fundamental Concepts of Marketing

These are the following fundamental concepts of marketing which are given below:

Needs

A human need is a state of felt deprivation of some basic satisfaction. People require food, clothing, shelter, safety, belonging, esteem and a few other things for survival it includes needs that are physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self–actualization.

These needs are not created by their society or by marketers; they exist in the very texture of human biology and the human condition.

We need to understand what type of need the prospect customer has? Is it explicit, mentioned clearly or is it implicit, not expressed or unspoken?

There are five types of needs.

  • Stated Need
  • Real Need
  • Unstated Need
  • Delight Need
  • Secret Need

Wants

Wants are desires for specific satisfiers of these deeper needs. A Gujarati needs food and wants “Khichdi, Khaman & Khakhara”, need clothing’s and wants saree, salwar suit (for ladies) and Kuriyama, shirt and pants (for gents) for office wear, chaniyacholi (for girls) and kediyu (for boys) for social occasions like Garba, and needs leisure by travelling.

In another society, those needs are satisfied differently: Malays, in Malaysia and Singapore, satisfy their hunger with local food, their clothing needs on special occasions with the bajukurong or kebaya, and their leisure needs are satisfied through shopping and movie watching. Human wants are continually shaped and reshaped by social forces and institutions such as religious groups, schools, families and business corporations.

Demands

Demands are wants for specific products that are backed by an ability and willingness to buy them. Individual wants become demand when supported by purchasing power. There are many people who want a Macbook, but only a few are able and willing to buy one.

Companies must therefore measure not only how many people want their product but, more importantly, how many would actually be willing and able to buy it.

There are eight types of Demands

  • Negative Demand
  • Nonexistent Demand
  • Latent Demand
  • Declining Demand
  • Irregular Demand
  • Full Demand
  • Overfull Demand
  • Unwholesome Demand

Philosophy of Marketing

The philosophy of marketing has five concepts under with organisation conduct their marketing activities:

Exchange Concept

This concept holds the central idea in marketing as exchange–exchange of product between the seller and the buyer. Some firms operate with the idea that marketing is simply a matter of giving a product to someone in exchange for money.

Marketing is broader than exchange. Marketing includes concern for customers, generation of value satisfaction, creative selling and integrated action for serving the customer. Exchange covers the physical aspects and the price mechanism involved in marketing. Exchange concepts are the least evolved view on marketing.

Production Concept

This is the oldest concept guiding sellers. In this concept, the firm believes that business can be managed by maximizing production so that the unit cost of the product will be low. It is assumed that the low price of the product will attract the customer.

Product Concept

In this concept consumers will prefer the product that offers quality, performance, new product, ideally designed and engineered products and innovative features. Managers in these product-oriented organizations achieve success by focusing their energy on making superior products, emphasis on quality assurance, and product attributes.

The Selling Concept

In this concept, firms believe that the main marketing concern is to aggressively push the product and persuade the customer to buy the offered product. However, the consumer will only buy the product if the organisation undertakes a large–scale selling, heavy advertising, extensive sales promotion and substantial price discounts as the tools of sales concepts. The concept is unlikely to succeed as it assumes that selling is synonymous with marketing

Marketing Concept

There are firms that believe that the customer is central to their business. This concept holds that achieving the organisational goals depends on determining the needs and wants of target markets and delivering the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than the competitors do.


Principles of Marketing

Followings are the principles of marketing:

Product

Product: Means goods and the services which are offered by the company to the target market, to satisfy needs and wants.

Price

Price: This means the money that the customer has to pay to buy a product or service.

Promotion

Promotion: Refers to activities of personal selling, advertisement, and communicating product benefits and attributes to target consumers to persuade them to purchase.

Place

Place: Stands for Physical distribution activities through which the product moves from the factory to the customer. Channels include distribution, logistics, warehousing, transport, etc.


Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.