Business World - Marketing

Introduction

Marketing is the process by which a product or service originates and is then priced, promoted, and distributed to consumers. In large corporations the principal marketing functions precede the manufacture of a product. Marketing involves different things like market research and product development, design, and testing. Marketing concentrates primarily on the buyers, or consumers. After determining the customers' needs and desires, marketers develop strategies that are designed to educate customers about a product's most important features, persuade them to buy it, and then to enhance their satisfaction with the purchase. Where marketing once stopped with the sale, today businesses believe that it is more profitable to sell to existing customers than to new ones. As a result, marketing now also involves finding ways to turn one-time purchasers into lifelong customers (Beckman & Davidson 1967).

Marketing includes planning, organizing, directing, and controlling the decision-making regarding product lines, pricing, promotion, and servicing. In most of these areas marketing has overall authority and it affects the decisions that concern the abovementioned different areas; in others, as in product-line development, its function is primarily advisory. In addition, the marketing department of a business firm is responsible for the physical distribution of the products, determining the channels of distribution that will be used, and supervising the profitable flow of goods from the factory or warehouse (Beckman & Davidson 1967).

Marketing is about satisfying customer wants and needs and in the course of doing so facilitating the achievement of an organization's objectives. By paying attention to customer wants and needs, organizations are more likely to achieve their objectives in the marketplace. Of course, organizations have to compete with each other and so also have to satisfy customers' wants and needs at least as well as their competitors. Fortunately, organizations can do this in different ways (Proctor 2000). Of all the forces affecting modern marketing, perhaps none is more important than globalization. Local companies that never even considered international competition now find foreign competitors stocked on shelves right alongside their own products. Some economists argue that local companies should be protected from such competition through legislation that regulates the flow of goods through trade barriers and other measures.

Others oppose such regulation, arguing that it only raises prices for consumers. Globalization, however, is only one force changing the way companies market their products or services. Another involves changes in the very interests and desires of consumers themselves. Consumers today are more sophisticated