An Overview of Marketing

Marketing: What's It All About?

A traditional market square on market day is the natural beginning of the marketing process. Buyers meet sellers, and they trade. The best produce sells at good prices but poor produce is often left on the stall or has to be sold cheaply at the end of the day.

All over the world, for generations buyers and sellers have met face to face on the market square and bartered, argued, haggled and traded - they are natural marketers always in tune with the needs of their customers.

But then, as businesses all over the world became bigger and more organized, managers often lost that direct contact with their customers and as a result some companies, without realizing what was happening, started to produce products that their customers didn't really want. Having lost touch they continued to develop and sell the products that they could make, rather than finding out what their customers really wanted and adapting their production to make those products.

"You can have your car in any color you like, as long as it's black." (Henry Ford)

 One of the simplest definition is: satisfying needs and wants through an exchange process

According to the American Marketing Association (AMA) Board of Directors, Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

Professor Philip Kotler explained that marketing is meeting the needs of your customer at a profit. For me that definition extends beyond just communicating product features. Marketers are responsible for a 360-degree experience.

Academic Definition of Marketing is: The process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals.

In recent years the Chartered Institute of Marketing produced a more current definition of the marketing concept which is: 'Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements.

We can keep listing some other definition, but From the above I found out that Marketing is all about creating an exchange that satisfy the consumer needs and the company goals. 

That leads us to a new term which is " EXCHANGE ". What is exchange?

I believe most of the readers already know what is exchange. Basically it's the idea that people give up something to receive something they would rather have .

The secret of good marketing is not just to identify and satisfy your customer's requirements but to satisfy them at a price that is acceptable to both of you - one that provides you with a profit and also ensures that the customer is retained as a future purchaser:

Customer satisfaction + supplier profitability = repeat sales

Unless you are a monopoly supplier, to achieve this balance you need to be market focused, continually aware of what your customers think and how your market is behaving.

As we have already mentioned, the secret of good marketing is not only to identify and satisfy your customer's requirements but also to try to develop customer loyalty, encourage repeat purchases and make a profit (or achieve a defined objective).

Getting your customer to like you, or at least to like doing business with you, is becoming increasingly vital to businesses of all types - transport, retail, financial services and so on - as usually it is all too easy for the customer to walk away and buy elsewhere.

Getting your customer to like you means that you have to make an extra effort to find out what they want and then provide it - at a profit.