Marketing Definition And Understanding

Marketing as defined by Webster’s Dictionary is “the commercial processes involved in promoting and selling and distributing a product or service.” (Webster’s 2008) In my definition of marketing it comes down to a few points. Marketing is taking a product and showing the consumer how it shall benefit them. In all actuality marketing comes down to the basic idea of selling and successfully advertising your product. In a third perspective the definition of marketing as defined by Wikipedia is, “marketing is the craft of linking the producers (or potential producers) of a product or service with customers, both existing and potential.” (Wikipedia 2008) Marketing is not only important to government and social sciences but more importantly with economics and especially in consumer economics. In this paper there will be three examples of how marketing in consumer economics is key to their success, how it is used well to define what the customer needs and finally how it can affect a company negatively.

To begin, marketing is a key to any organizations success no matter how large or small the business is. As a consumer business it is a common goal whether it is stated out loud or not that in order to be successful one of the key factors is to keep you consumers satisfied and happy with your product. You need to first understand the human needs; this idea is explained especially well by Perreault-McCarthy in their Basic Marketing: A Global-Managerial Approach. They declared that, “Some people think that if you just produce a good product, customers will be satisfied and your business will be a success. This attitude is reflected in the old saying: “Make a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” The “better mousetrap” idea probably wasn’t true in Grandpa’s time, and it certainly isn’t true today. In modern economies, the grass grows high on the path to the Better Mousetrap FactoryвЂ"if the new mousetrap is not properly marketed. Production and marketing are both important parts of a total business system aimed at providing consumers with need-satisfying goods and services. Together, production and marketing supply five kinds of economic utilityвЂ"form; task, time, place, and possession utilityвЂ"that are needed to provide consumer satisfaction.”

Secondly, by understanding this previous idea it leads directly to the next point of how this is actually used to find what the customer needs. As stated by Armstrong and Kotler in their book Marketing: An Introduction, they stated that “research(ing) current customers deeply to learn about their desires, gather new product and service ideas, and test proposed product improvements. Such customer-driven marketing usually works well when a clear need exists and when customers know what they want.” But what do you do when the customer does not know what they want? Armstrong and Kotler say that “such situations call for customer-driving marketingвЂ"understanding customer needs even better than customers themselves do and creating