INTRODUCTION

Formally or informally, people and organization engage in a vast number of

activities we could call marketing. Good marketing has become increasingly
vital for success. But what constitutes good marketing is constantly evolving
and changing.
Good marketing is no accident, but a result of careful planning and execution
using state-of-the-art tools and techniques. It becomes both an art and a
science as marketers strive to find creative new solutions to often-complex
challenges amid profound changes in the 21st century marketing environment.
Finance, operations, accounting, and other business functions won’t really
matter without sufficient demand for products and services so the firm can
make a profit. In other words, there must be a top line for there to be a
bottom line. Thus financial success often depends on marketing ability.
Successful marketing builds demand for products and services, which, in turn,
creates jobs. By contributing to the bottom line, successful marketing also
allows firms to more fully engage in socially responsible activities.
Marketers must decide what features to design into a new product or service,
what prices to set, where to products or offer services, and how much to spend
on advertising, sales, the internet, or mobile marketing. One of the defining
changes resulting from the increasing popularity of the Internet is the
explosive growth of social networking media. This powerful medium is rapidly
changing the ways in which companies connect with customers and how they
market their products and services.
Marketing is about identifying and meeting human and social needs. One of
the shortest definitions of marketing is “meeting needs profitably.”
The American Marketing Association offers the following format definition:
Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and process for creating,
communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for
customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
Marketing Management as the art and science of choosing target markets and
getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, delivering, and
communicating superior customer value.
Peter Drucker – Management Guru says:
There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of
marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know
and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and
sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy.
All that should be needed then is to make the product or service available.
What is Marketed?
Goods – Physical goods constitute the bulk of most countries production and
marketing efforts.
Services – Services include Tourism, airlines, Restaurants, railways, bus
services, hospitals, Insurance, banking, transport, legal and accounting
services, management consultants, doctors, IT solutions, printing services,
hotels, etc
Events – Marketers promote time-based events, such as major trade shows,
artistic performances, company anniversaries, Olympics, World Cups, IPL.
Experiences – A firm can create, stage, and market experiences eg. Water
park, amusement park and enjoy the thrill provided by these experiences.
Persons – Artists, musicians, CEOs, high profile lawyers and financiers, and
other professionals all get help from celebrity marketers. Celebrities such as
Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar, Virat Kohli, Shah Rukh Khan, Amir Khan,
M S Dhoni are big brands in themselves.
Places – Cities, states, and whole nations compete to attract tourists,
residents, factories and company HQs. The tourism industry is a good example
of place marketing.
Properties – Properties are intangible rights of ownership to either real
property (real state) or financial property (stocks and bonds). They are bought
and sold. Real estate agents work for property owners or sellers, or they buy
and sell residential or commercial real estate. Investment companies and
banks market securities to both institutional and individual investors.
Organizations – Organizations work to build a strong, favourable, and unique
image in the minds of their target public. Many organisations undertake
socially useful initiatives in domain such as health, education, women’s
empowerment, and poverty alleviation as part of their CSR. These help
companies to develop a favourable company and enhance brand perceptions
among the publics.
Information – The production, packaging and distribution of information are
major industries. Information is essentially what books, schools, and
universities produce, market, and distribute at a price to parents, students and
communities.
Ideas – Every market offering include a basic idea. Products and Services are
platforms for delivering some idea or benefit. Marketing has an important role
in influencing attitudes and behaviours, such as creating awareness about HIV /
AIDS, family planning, discouraging smoking and alcohol, promoting voluntary
eye and blood donation.

Marketers are skilled at stimulating demand for their products. Marketers are
responsible for demand management. They seek to influence the level, timing,
and composition of demand to meet the organization’s objectives.
Markets: Traditionally, a “market” was a physical place where buyers and
sellers gathered to buy and sell goods. Economists describe a market as a
collection of buyers and sellers who transact over a particular product or
product class.
Manufacturer Market – Manufacturers go to resource markets (raw material
markets, labour markets, money markets), buy resources and turn them into
goods and services, and sell finished goods to intermediaries, who sell them to
consumers.
Consumers sell their labour and receive money with which they pay for goods
and services.
The government collects tax revenues to buy goods from resource,
manufacturer, and intermediary market and uses these goods and services to
provide public services.
Marketers use the term market to cover various groupings of customers. They
view sellers as constituting the industry and buyers as constituting the market.
Sellers and buyers are connected by 4 flows. Sellers send goods and
communications such as ads and direct mail to the market; in return they
receive money and information such as customer attitudes and sales data. The
inner loop shows an exchange of money for goods and services; the outer loop
shows an exchange of information.

Key Customer Markets:

Consumer Markets: B2C. Companies spend a great deal of time establishing
brand image by developing a superior product and packaging, ensuring its
availability, and backing it with engaging communications and reliable service.

Business Markets: B2B. Companies selling business goods and services often
face well-informed professional buyers skilled at evaluating competitive
offerings. Business buyers buy goods to make or resell a product to others at a
profit. Business marketers must demonstrate how their products will help
achieve higher revenue or lower costs. Advertising can play a role, but the
sales force, the price and company’s reputation may play a greater role.
Global Markets:

Nonprofit and Governmental Markets: Companies selling to non-profit

organizations with limited purchasing power such as churches, temples,
universities, charitable organizations and government agencies need to price
carefully. Lower selling prices affect the features and quality the seller can
build into the offering. Much government purchasing calls for bids (tenders),
and buyers often focus on practical solutions and favour the lowest bid.
Marketplace: The marketplace is physical, such as a store you shop in.
Marketspace is digital, online shopping (shopping on the internet)
Metamarket: A cluster of complementary products and services closely related
in the minds of consumers, but spread across a diverse set of industries.
Metamarkets are the result of marketers packaging a system that simplifies
carrying out these related product/service activities. The automobile
metamarket consists of automobile manufacturer, new and used car dealers,
finance companies, insurance companies, mechanics, spare parts dealers,
service shops, auto magazines, classified auto ads in newspapers and auto sites
on the internet.
Core Marketing Concepts:
Needs are the basic human requirements such as for air, food, shelter, water,
and clothing.
Humans also have strong needs for recreation, education and entertainment.
These needs become wants when they are directed to specific objects that
might satisfy the need.
Demands are wants for specific products backed by an ability to pay. Many
people want to buy a Mercedes; only a few are able to buy one. Companies
must measure not only how many people want their product, but also how
many are willing and able to buy it.
These distinctions shed light on the frequent criticism that “marketers create
needs” or “marketers get people to buy things they don’t want.” Marketers do
not create needs: Needs pre-exist marketers. Marketers, along with other
societal factors, influence wants. They might promote the idea that a
Mercedes would satisfy a person’s needs for social status. They do not,
however, create the need for social status.
Target Markets, Positioning and Segmentation: (STP)
Not everyone likes the same movie, cereal, restaurant, or college. Therefore,
marketers start by dividing the market into segments. They identify and profile
distinct groups of buyers who might prefer or require varying product and
service mixes by examining demographic, psychographic, and behavioural
differences among buyers.
After identifying market segments, the marketer decides which present the
greatest opportunities – which are the target markets. For each, the firm
develops a market offering that it positions in the minds of the target buyers as
delivering some central benefit(s). Volvo develops its cars for buyers to whom
safety is a major concern, positioning its vehicles as the safest a customer can
buy.
Offerings and Brands: Companies address customer needs by putting forth a
value proposition, a set of benefits that satisfy those needs. The intangible
value proposition is made physical by an offering, which can be a combination
of products, services, information and experiences.
A brand is an offering from a known source. A brand such as McDonald’s
carries many associations in people’s minds that make up its image: burgers,
cleanliness, convenience, courteous service, and golden arches. All companies
strive to build a brand image with as many strong favourable, and unique
brand associations as possible.
Value and Satisfaction: The buyer chooses the offerings he or she perceives to
deliver the most value, the sum of the tangible and intangible benefits and
costs to her. Value, a central marketing concept, is primarily a combination of
quality, service and price (qsp), called the customer value triad. Value
perceptions increase with quality and service but decrease with price.
Satisfaction reflects a person’s judgment of product’s perceived performance
in relationship to expectations. If the performance falls short of expectations,
the customer is disappointed. If it matches expectations, the customer is
satisfied. If it exceeds them, the customer delighted.
Marketing Channels: To reach a target market, the marketer uses three kinds
of marketing channels:
Communication channel deliver and receive messages from target buyers and
include Newspapers, Magazines radio, TV, mail and telephone, billboards,
poster, fliers, CDs, audiotapes, and the Internet. Beyond these, firms
communicate through the look of their retail stores and Websites and other
media. Marketers are increasingly adding dialogue channels such as email,
blogs and the toll-free numbers.
The marketer uses distribution channels to display, sell, or deliver the physical
product or service(s) to the buyer or user. These channels may be direct via the
internet, mail, or mobile phone or telephone, or indirect with distributors,
wholesalers, retailers, and agents as intermediaries.
To carry out transactions with potential buyers, the marketer also uses service
channels that include warehouses, transport companies, banks, and insurance
companies. Marketers must choose the best mix of communication,
distribution and service channels for their offerings.
Supply Chain is a longer channel stretching from raw materials to components
to finished goods carried to final buyers.
Competition includes all the actual and potential rival offerings and substitutes
a buyer might consider.

Evolution of earlier Marketing ideas:

The Production concept is the oldest concepts in business. It holds that
consumers prefer products that are widely available and inexpensive.
Managers of production oriented businesses concentrate on achieving high
production efficiency, low costs and mass distribution.
The product concept proposes that consumers favour products offering the
most quality, performance, or innovative features. A new or improved product
will not be necessarily be successful unless it is priced, distributed, advertised
and sold properly.
The selling concept holds that consumers and business, if left alone, won’t buy
enough of the organization’s products. It is practiced most aggressively with
unsought goods – buyers don’t normally think of buying such as Insurance –
and when firms with overcapacity aim to sell what they make, rather than
make what the market wants.
The marketing concept emerged in the mid-1950s as a customer-centered,
sense-and-respond philosophy. The job is not the right customer for your
products, but right products for your customer. Dell doesn’t prepare a
perfect computer for its target market. Rather, it provides product platforms
on which each person customizes the features he or she desired on the
computer.
Harward’s Theodore Levitt drew a comparison between selling and marketing.
According to Levitt, “Selling focuses on the needs of the seller; marketing on
the needs of the buyer (customer). Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need
to convert into cash; marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the
customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated
with creating, delivering and finally consuming it.”
In selling, cost determines the price. In Marketing, price determines the cost.
Several scholars found that companies embracing the marketing concept at
the time achieved superior performance.
The Holistic Marketing Concept is based on the development, design, and
implementation of marketing programs, processes, and activities that
recognize their breadth and interdependencies. Holistic marketing
acknowledges that everything matters in marketing – and that a broad,
integrated perspective is often necessary.

Relationship Marketing:
Increasingly, a key goal of marketing is to develop deep, ensuring relationships
with people and organizations that directly or indirectly affect the success of
the firm’s marketing activities.
Relationship Marketing aims to build mutually satisfying long-term
relationships with key constituents in order to earn and retain their business.
Four key constituents for relationships marketing are customers, employees,
marketing partners (channels, suppliers, distributors, dealers, agencies), and
members of the financial community (shareholders, investors, analysts).
Marketing must create prosperity among all these constituents and balance
the returns to all the key stakeholders. To develop strong relationships with
them requires understanding their capabilities and resources, needs, goals and
desires.
The ultimate outcome of relationship marketing is a unique company asset
called a marketing network, consisting of the company and its supporting
stakeholders – customers, employees, suppliers, distributors, retailers, and
others – with whom it has built mutually profitable business relationships. The
operating principle is simple: build an effective network of relationships with
key stakeholders, and profits will follow. Thus more companies are choosing to
own brands rather than physical assets and are subcontracting activities to
firms that can do them better and more cheaply, while retaining core activities
at home.
Companies are also shaping separate offer, services, and messages to
individual customers, based on information about post transaction,
demographics, psychographics, and media and distribution preferences.
Because attracting a new customer may cost 5 times as much as retaining an
existing one, Relationship Marketing also emphasis customer retention.
Companies build customer share by offering a larger variety of goods to
existing customers, training employees in cross-selling and up-selling.
Marketing must skilfully conduct not only customer relationship management
(CRM) but partner relationship management (PRM) as well. Companies are
deepening their partnering arrangements with key suppliers and distributors,
seeing them as partners in delivering value to final customers, so everybody
benefits.
Integrated Marketing – The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Each
communication message should deliver a consistent brand message at every
contact.
The 4 Ps
McCarthy classified various marketing activities into marketing-mix tools of
four broad kinds, which he called the four Ps of marketing: Product, Price,
Promotion and Place.
Marketing Mix – 4Ps
1. Product – Product variety, Quality, Design, Features, Brand Name,
Packaging, Sizes, Services, Warranties, Returns.
2. Price – List Price, Discounts, Allowances, Payment Period, Credit terms
3. Promotion – Sales Promotion, Advertising, Direct Marketing, Personal
Selling, Public Relations
4. Place – Channels, Coverage, Assortments, Locations, Inventory,
Transport.
Modern Management Four Ps:
People
Processes
Programs
Performance
Think big, think fast, think ahead. Ideas are no one's monopoly.