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An Overview of Marketing

Marketing and You

Marketing is all around us. Indeed, some might say we live in a branded world. Value refers to the benefits a customer receives from buying a good or service.Yo u have“market value” as a person--you have qualities that set you apart from others and abilities other people want and need. So, the principles of marketing apply to people, just as they apply to coffee,convertibles,and computer processors. Sure, there are differences in how we go about marketing with each of these, but the general idea remains the same: Marketing is a fundamental part of our lives both as consumers and as players in the business world.

The Who and Where of Marketing

Marketers come from many different backgrounds and work in a variety of locations and organizations. All marketers are real people who make choices that affect themselves, their companies, and very often thousands or even millions of consumers.

Marketing’s Role in the Firm: Working Cross-Functionally

The importance organizations assign to marketing activities varies a lot. Some firms realize that marketing applies to all aspects of the firm’s activities. As a result, there has been a trend toward integrating marketing with other business functions (such as management and accounting) instead of making it a separate function. A marketer’s decisions affect--and are affected by--the firm’s other operations.

The Value of Marketing

Marketing is defined as an organizational function and a set of processes for creating,communicating and delivering value to customers, and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders. Marketing is all about delivering value to everyone who is affected by a transaction.

Marketing is about Meeting Needs

One important part of our definition of marketing is that it is about meeting the needs of diverse stakeholders. The term stakeholders here refers to buyers, sellers, investors in a company, community residents, and even citizens of the nations where goods and services are made or sold--in other words, any person or organization that has a “stake” in the outcome. Thus, marketing is about satisfying everyone involved in the marketing process.

One important stakeholder is you. A consumer is the ultimate user of a good or service. Consumers can be individuals or organizations, whether a company, government, sorority, or charity.

Most successful firms today practice the marketing concept--that is, marketers first identify consumers’ needs and then provide products that satisfy those needs, ensuring the firm’s long-term profitability. A need is the difference between a consumer’s actual state and some ideal or desired state. When the difference is big enough, the consumer is motivated to take action to satisfy the need. Needs relate to physical functions (such as eating) or to psychological ones (such as wanting to look good). The specific way a person satisfies a need depends on his or her unique history, learning experiences, and cultural environment.

A want is a desire for a particular product we use to satisfy a need in specific ways that are culturally and socially influenced.

A product delivers a benefit when it satisfies a need or want. For marketers to be successful, they must develop products that provide one or more benefits that are important to consumers.

When you couple desire with the buying power or resources to satisfy a want, the result is demand.

A market consists of all the consumers who share a common need that can be satisfied by a specific product and who have the resources, willingness, and authority to make the purchase.

A marketplace used to be a location where buying and selling communicates face to face. In today’s “wired” world, however, buyers and sellers might not even see each other. The modern marketplace may take the form of a grand shopping mall, a mail-order catalog, a television shopping network, an eBay auction, or an E-commerce website.

Marketing is about Creating Utility

Marketing activities play a major role in creating utility, which refers to the sum of the benefits we receive when we use a good or service.

Marketing processes create several different kinds of utility to provide value to consumers:

● Form utility is the benefit marketing provides by transforming raw materials into finished products.

● Place utility is the benefit marketing provides by making products available where customers want them.

● Time utility is the benefit marketing provides by storing products until they are needed.

● Possession utility is the benefit marketing provides by allowing the consumer to own, use, and enjoy the product.

Marketing is about Exchanging Relationships

At the heart of every marketing act--big or small--is something we refer to as an“exchange relationship”. An exchange occurs when a person gives something and gets something else in return. The buyer receives an object, service, or idea that satisfies a need and the seller receives something he feels equivalent.

For an exchange to occur, at least two people or organizations must be willing to make a trade, and each must have something the other wants. Both must agree on the value of the exchange and how it will be carried out. Each party must also be free to accept or reject the other’s terms for the exchange.

The Evolution of Marketing

The Production Era

Production orientation works best in a seller’s market when demand is greater than supply because it focuses on the most efficient ways to produce and distribute products. Essentially, consumers have to take whatever is available. Under these conditions, marketing plays a relatively insignificant role--the goods literally sell themselves because people have no other choices. Firms that focus on a production orientation tend to view the market as a homogeneous group that will be satisfied with the basic function of a product.

The Sales Era

When product availability exceeds demand in a buyer’s market, businesses may engage in the “hard sell” in which salespeople aggressively push their wares. Selling orientation means that management views marketing as a sales function, or a way to move products out of warehouses so that inventories don’t pile up. The selling orientation gained in popularity after World War II. The selling orientation prevailed well into the 1950s. But consumers as a rule don’t like to be pushed, and the hard sell gave marketing a bad image. Companies that still follow selling orientation tend to be more successful at making one-time sales rather than at building repeat business. We are most likely to find this focus among companies that sell unsought goods--products that people don’t tend to buy without some prodding.

The Relationship Era

A consumer orientation satisfies customers’ needs and wants. But with inflation, firms had to do more than meet consumers’ needs--they had to do this better in the competition and do it repeatly.

A triple bottom-line orientation means building long-term bonds with customers rather than merely selling stuff to them today. This new way of looking at business emphasizes the need to maximize three components:

● The financial bottom line: Financial profits to stakeholders

● The social bottom line: Contributing to the communities in which the company operates

● The environmental bottom line: Creating sustainable business practices that minimize the damage to environment or that even improve it

One outgrowth of this new way of thinking was the concept of customer relationship management (CRM), which involves systematically tracking consumers’ preferences and behaviors over time in order to tailor the value proposition as closely as possible to each individual’s unique wants and needs.

Companies must find new and innovative ways to stand out from the crowd and become an integral part of consumers’ lives rather than just being a dry company that makes and sells products. Another result of this new way of long-term thinking is the social marketing concept, which maintains that marketers must satisfy customers’ needs in ways that also benefit society while still delivering a profit to the firm.

An important trend now is for companies to think of ways to design and manufacture products with a focus on sustainability, which we define as “meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

In addition to building long-term relationships and focusing on social responsibility, Triple bottom-line firms place a much greater focus on accountability--measuring just how much value marketing activities create. This means that marketers at these organizations ask hard questions about the true value of their efforts and their impact on the bottom line. These questions all boil down to the simple acronym of ROI (return on investment). Marketers now realize that if they want to assess just how much value they are creating for the firm, they need to know exactly what they are spending and what the concrete results of their actions are.

What Can Be Marketed?

Consumer Goods and Services

Consumer goods are the tangible products that individual consumers purchase for personal or family use. Services are intangible products that we pay for and use but never own. In both cases, though, keep in mind that the consumer looks to obtain some underlying value, such as convenience, security, or status, from a marketing exchange.

Business-to-business Goods and Services

Business-to-business marketing is the marketing of goods and services from one organization to another. Although we usually relate marketing to the thousands of consumer goods every day, the reality is that businesses and other organizations buy a lot more goods than consumers do. They purchase these industrial goods for further processing or to use in their own business operations.

Not-for-profit Marketing

Organizations with charitable, educational, community, and other public services buy goods and services to support their functions and to attract and serve their members.

Idea, Place, and People Marketing

Marketing principles are also used to market ideas, places, and people. Examples include:

● Tourism marketing

● Convincing consumers to wear seatbelts

● Paying to see a performer based on promises made in a promotional campaign

Some of the same principles that go into “creating” a celebrity apply to you. An entertainer--whether 50 Cent or Tony Bennett--must “package” his talents, identify a target market that is likely to be interested, and work hard to gain exposure to these potential customers by appearing in the right musical venues.

The Value of Marketing and the Marketing of Value

Value refers to the benefits a customer receives from buying a good or service. Marketing then communicates these benefits to the customer in the form of a value proposition, a marketplace offering that fairly and accurately sums up the value that the customer will realize if he purchases the product. The challenge to the marketer is to create an attractive value proposition. A big part of this challenge is convincing customers that this value proposition is superior to others they might choose from competitors.

Value from the Customer’s Perspective

The value proposition includes the whole bundle of benefits the firm promises to deliver, not just the benefits of the product themselves.

Value from the Seller’s Perspective

Value from a seller’s perspective can take many forms such as prestige or pride in their competitive advantage.

Building Value through Customers

Smart companies today understand that making money from a single transaction doesn’t provide the kind of value they desire. Thus their goal is to satisfy the customer over and over again so that they can build a long-term relationship rather than just having a“one-night stand.”

Companies that calculate the lifetime value of a customer look at how much profit they expect to make from a particular customer, including each and every purchase he (or she) will make from them now and in the future. To calculate lifetime value, companies estimate the amount the person will spend and then subtract what it will cost to maintain this relationship.

Providing Value through Competitive Advantage

How does a firm go about creating a competitive advantage?

The first step is to identify what it does really well. A distinctive competency is a firm’s capability that is superior to others in competition.

The second step in developing a competitive advantage is to turn a distinctive competency into a differential benefit--one that is important to customers. Differential benefits set products apart from competitors’ products by providing something unique that customers want. Differential benefits provide reasons for customers to pay a premium for a firm’s products and exhibit a strong brand preference.

Effective product benefits must be both different from the competition and things customers want.A firm that delivers these desired benefits provides value to its customers and other stakeholders.

Adding Value through the Value Chain

Many different workers--both within and outside a firm--need to work together to create and deliver value to customers. The value chain is a useful way to appreciate all the people that work together to create value. This term refers to a series of activities involved in designing, producing, marketing, delivering, and supporting any product. In addition to marketing activities, the value chain includes business functions such as human resource management and technology development.

The main activities of value-chain members include the following:

● Inbound logistics:Bringing in materials to make the product

● Operations:Converting the materials into the final product

● Outbound logistics:Shipping out the final product

● Marketing:Promoting and selling the final product

● Service:Meeting the customer’s needs by providing any additional support required

Consumer-generated Value: From Audience to Community

One of the most exciting new developments in the marketing world is the evolution of how consumers interact with marketers. In particular, we’re watching people actually generating value instead of just buying it everyday--consumers are turning into advertising directors, retailers, and new-product-development consultants.

Social Networking

Social networking is an integral part of so-called Web 2.0--the new generation of the World Wide Web that incorporates social networking and user interactivity.

The Wisdom of Crowds perspective argues that under the right circumstances, groups are smarter than the smartest people in them. If this is true, it implies that large numbers of (nonexpert) consumers can predict successful products.

Value from Society’s Perspective

Every company’s activities influence the world around it, in ways both good and bad. We must consider how marketing transactions add or subtract value from society. Companies usually find that stressing ethics and social responsibility also is good business, at least in the long run.

Is Marketing Evil?

The marketing field sometimes gets attacked for a number of reasons. Here are some primary ones:

● Criticism: Marketing corrupts society. A Response: A need is a basic biological motive; a want represents one way that society taught us to satisfy the need.

● Criticism: Advertising and marketing are unnecessary. A Response: Products are designed to meet existing needs, and advertising only helps to communicate their availability.

● Criticism: Marketers promise miracles and manipulate consumers. A Response:Advertisers simply do not know enough about people to manipulate them.

The Dark Side of Marketing

Whether intentionally or not, some marketers do violate their bond of trust with consumers. Despite the best efforts of researchers, government regulators, and concerned industry people, sometimes consumers’ worst enemies are themselves--our desires, choices, and actions often result in negative consequences to ourselves and the society in which we live.

Some dimensions of “the dark side” of consumer behavior include:

● Terrorism

● Addictive consumption:Consumption addiction is a physiological or psychological dependency on goods or services.

● Exploiting people: Sometimes people are used or exploited, willingly or not, for commercial gain in the marketplace.

● Illegal activities:The cost of crimes consumers commit against business has been estimated to be more than $40 billion per year. A retail theft is committed every five seconds.

● Anticonsumption: Some types of destructive consumer behavior are anticonsumption--events in which people deliberately deface products.