Marketing
Task 1
What is marketing?
What does the term marketing mean? Many people think of marketing only as selling and advertising. And no wonder, for every day we are bombarded with television commercials ,newspaper ads, direct mail campaigns, Internet pitches and sales calls. Although they are important, they are only two of many marketing functions and are often not the most important ones.
Today, marketing must be understood not in the old sense of making a sale – ‘telling and selling’ – but in the new sense of satisfying customer needs. Selling occurs only after a product is produced. By contrast, marketing starts long before a company has a product. Marketing is the homework that managers undertake to assess needs, measure their extent and intensity and determine whether a profitable opportunity exists. Marketing continues throughout the product’s life, trying to find new customers and keep current customers by improving product appeal and performance, learning from product sales results and managing repeat performance.
Everyone knows something about ‘hot’ products. When Sony designed PlayStation, when Nokia introduced fashionable mobile phones, when The Body Shop introduced animal-cruelty-free cosmetics and toiletries, these manufacturers were swamped with orders.
Like Swatch and Smart Car, they were ‘right’ products offering new benefits; not ‘me-too’ products. Peter Drucker, a leading management thinker, has put it this way: ‘The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits . . . and sells itself.’2 If the marketer does a good job of identifying customer needs, develops products that provide superior value, distributes and promotes them effectively, these goods will sell very easily. This does not mean that selling and advertising are unimportant. Rather, it means that they are part of a larger marketing mix – a set of marketing tools that work together to
What is marketing?
What does the term marketing mean? Many people think of marketing only as selling and advertising. And no wonder, for every day we are bombarded with television commercials ,newspaper ads, direct mail campaigns, Internet pitches and sales calls. Although they are important, they are only two of many marketing functions and are often not the most important ones.
Today, marketing must be understood not in the old sense of making a sale – ‘telling and selling’ – but in the new sense of satisfying customer needs. Selling occurs only after a product is produced. By contrast, marketing starts long before a company has a product. Marketing is the homework that managers undertake to assess needs, measure their extent and intensity and determine whether a profitable opportunity exists. Marketing continues throughout the product’s life, trying to find new customers and keep current customers by improving product appeal and performance, learning from product sales results and managing repeat performance.
Everyone knows something about ‘hot’ products. When Sony designed PlayStation, when Nokia introduced fashionable mobile phones, when The Body Shop introduced animal-cruelty-free cosmetics and toiletries, these manufacturers were swamped with orders.
Like Swatch and Smart Car, they were ‘right’ products offering new benefits; not ‘me-too’ products. Peter Drucker, a leading management thinker, has put it this way: ‘The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits . . . and sells itself.’2 If the marketer does a good job of identifying customer needs, develops products that provide superior value, distributes and promotes them effectively, these goods will sell very easily. This does not mean that selling and advertising are unimportant. Rather, it means that they are part of a larger marketing mix – a set of marketing tools that work together to