Marketing

The American Marketing Association suggests that Marketing is "the process of planning and executing the pricing, promotion, and distribution of goods, ideas, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals." Another definition, perhaps simpler and more universal, is the process of moving people closer to making a decision to purchase, use, follow, refer, upload, download, obey, reject, conform, become complacent to another person's, society's or organization's value. Simply, if it doesn't facilitate a "sale" then it's not marketing.

However, the most widely accepted definition of marketing on a global scale comes from the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) [1] in the UK, which is the largest marketing body in the world in terms of membership. The definition claims marketing to be the "management process of anticipating, identifying and satisfying customer requirements profitably". Thus, operative marketing involves the proccesses of market research, product development, product life cycle management, pricing, channel management as well as promotion. However, marketing is more of a process-oriented cross function, not a direct decision maker in these processes. It is one of the company's management tools to ensure that products and services are developed according to market requirements, and that they are profitable.

Prior to the advent of market research, most companies were product-focused, employing teams of salespeople to push their products into or onto the market, regardless of market desire. A market-focused, or customer-focused, organization instead first determines what its potential customers desire, and then builds the product or service. Marketing theory and practice is justified on the belief that customers use a product/service because they have a need, or because a product/service has a perceived benefit.

Two major aspects of marketing are the recruitment of new customers (acquisition) and the retention and expansion of relationships with existing customers (base management).

An emerging area of study and practice concerns internal marketing, or how employees are trained and managed to deliver the brand in a way that positively impacts the acquisition and retention of customers.

Once a marketer has converted the prospective buyer, base management marketing takes over. The process for base management shifts the marketer to building a relationship, nurturing the links, enhancing the benefits that sold the buyer in the first place, and improving the product/service continuously to protect her business from competitive encroachments.

Marketing methods are informed by many of the social sciences, particularly psychology, sociology, and economics. Market research underpins these activities. Through advertising, it is also related to many of the creative arts.

Contents

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* 1 Types of markets

* 2 Product, price, promotion, and placement

* 3 Technique

* 4 Criticism of marketing

* 5 Related lists

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Types of markets

The word market originally meant the place where the exchange between seller and buyer took place. Today we speak of a market as either a region where goods are sold and bought or particular types of buyers (summarized from Wells, Burnett, Moriarty, pg. 65Ð'-66). When strategizing specialists in marketing comment about markets they are usually referring to the different groups of people and/or organizations. The four major market groups are 1) consumer, 2) business to business, 3) institutional, and 4) reseller.

Branding refers to the sum total of your company's value-proposition: products, services, people, advertising, positioning, culture, and partner relationships.

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Product, price, promotion, and placement

In popular usage, "marketing" is the promotion of products, especially advertising and branding. However, in professional usage the term has a wider meaning that recognizes that marketing is customer centered. Products are often developed to meet the desires of groups of customers or even, in some cases, for specific customers. McCarthy divided marketing into four general sets of activities. His typology has become so universally recognized that his four activity sets, the Four Ps, have passed into the language.

The Four Ps are:

* Product: The Product management and Product marketing aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual good or service, and how it relates to the end-user's needs and wants.

* Pricing: This refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including discounts.

* Promotion: This includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, and refers to the various methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.

* Placement or distribution refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point of sale placement or retailing. This fourth P has also sometimes been called Place, referring to "where" a product or service is sold, e.g. in which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young adults, families, business people, women, men, etc.).

These four elements are often referred to as the marketing mix. A marketer can use these variables to craft a marketing plan. The four Ps model