Marketing is an essential element to business life. It is a powerful means of communicating ideas and promoting products to the target consumer. Marketing is not a one time effort. Marketing is continuous. This means that you must continuously work on marketing your business whether you have a small or large business to promote. Marketers should always evaluate the marketing mix each day.
The Definition Of Marketing
Marketing refers to the act by which an organisation undertakes to interact with its target consumer, develop strong relationships so as to acquire new customers, make value by selling goods and make money by selling services. The market research conducted by marketing organisations helps to understand the buying pattern of people and develop marketing campaigns accordingly. Marketing is one of the most important activities of the modern economy. Without marketing Research, businesses cannot compete.
It’s never been a question of marketing management being either theoretical or abstract. It’s all about using marketing concepts to drive your business forward in an effective manner.
Marketing Research
The marketing concept should be understood clearly to create an impact on consumers. Marketing Research should be a well defined process, based on precise measurements of market conditions. The objective of marketing Research is to determine the potential consumer response to marketing concepts. For example, a business that specializes in water pumps would do good to search for their products among online water pump reviews to gauge the opinion of their target consumer. In simple words, marketing Research helps marketers to understand how their goods and services are perceived by the consumers and what aspects attract more consumers to use their goods and services. The market concept and its marketing research help marketers to craft a strategy to sell more goods and services.
Understanding Consumers
Consumer’s need for innovative goods and services make them search for companies offering those goods and services. There are many factors affecting a consumer’s decision to buy. Some important ones are customer satisfaction, the presence and price/cost structure of competitors, reputation of the company, financial stability, etc. All these factors combine to decide which concept would be more appealing to customers and which marketing concept would provide better satisfaction to satisfy consumers.
Correlating Marketing And Selling
A major drawback of most marketing concepts is that they do not have any correlation with the market conditions. There is very little coordination between the marketing concept and the actual selling concept. A marketing concept may work fine in the short run, but if we look at the bigger picture, there is no correlation between marketing concept and actual selling concept. A good example is product concept where the marketing concept was designed to sell more particular products.
Tangible and Intangible Assets
Thus some companies focus only on selling their tangible assets, ignoring the intangible ones. They have no awareness of how their competitors are marketing their tangible goods and even less idea about the strategies used by competitors to sell their non tangible assets. A good marketing management system focuses on comprehensive marketing strategy with coordinated selling processes. A company should take care of all aspects of product development and marketing management.
Measuring Results
If we analyze the above points carefully, it becomes clear that marketing concepts are completely useless unless we can measure and qualify our marketing activities with respect to the actual objectives of marketing. A good marketing management system takes into consideration market size, demand and competition of the marketable goods and focuses on marketing strategies that would take maximum advantage of the competitive environment. This way, the company ensures that their marketing strategies are geared towards achieving the goals of the company without upsetting the equilibrium of the market.
Beyond Branding
Usually, when we see a brand name selling goods in the local market, we attribute the quality of the goods to the marketing strategy adopted by the company. However, marketing should be more than a tool to achieve brand recognition and sales; it should be an important tool for enhancing the quality of goods produced and selling them. It should be used to create value added service and product while creating competitive advantage by providing consumers with new customers and diversified distribution channels. Therefore, a comprehensive marketing strategy should take into consideration quality of goods being offered, market size of the market, demand and competition among the different brands and new customers.
Consumer Satisfaction
A very powerful concept that has evolved in recent years is the consumer satisfaction concept. According to this concept, marketing should not target at satisfying customers needs but should aim at providing customers with a value added service. In other words, it should be considered as an indirect marketing strategy that helps to reach out to a wider audience and promote the business. This is not at all similar to the conventional advertising practices where the consumer attention is directed towards a single product and its brand. Consumer satisfaction marketing focuses more on providing a value added service to the customers by creating and maintaining a long term relationship with them. Hence, companies should learn to create and maintain a long term business relationship with their customers by ensuring that customer satisfaction is achieved in the process.
Societal Marketing
The concept of societal marketing provides a new dimension to the entire marketing strategy. It is very important to understand the notion of societal marketing concept because the concept helps companies to go beyond their target markets by capturing other interests of the consumers. For example, if a company decides to enter into the healthcare market, it can first build a solid network of consumers by targeting the specific groups in the society. This will help the company to create awareness about the products sold, encourage them to purchase them, and create a base of loyal consumers who are willing to spread word about the products. These strategies help companies to reach out to the targeted groups and strengthen their foothold in the market.
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