Environmental Management

Environmental management

2. The concept of Marketing

Marketing has been playing an increasingly pivotal role in business. Therefore, it is vitally important for business people to understand the concept of marketing in an appropriate way. Elliott, Rundle-Thiele&Waller (2010, p.3) define marketing as " the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large". It not only specifies the necessity of mutual benefits for both buyers and sellers but also highlights that the groups of beneficiaries should not be constrained to only the users but to the partners and the society as well. In the case of 'Bathurst Carbon Cutters', the organisation who provides share bikes has to ensure that the 'share bike concept' is going to benefit not only themselves, the users, such as pedestrians in Bathurst CBD and university students, but also BCC's partners and Bathurst community.

3. Marketing philosophies (marketing evolution) :

Marketing evolution has been described by two main scholars with slightly different angles. According to Adam, Armstrong, Brown & Kotler (2004), the ways in which various organisations conduct their marketing activities can be very much differentiated depending on the weight of interests they consider to give to the organisation, the customers and the society. There are five alternative philosophies that guide various marketing activities:

1) The production concept

This concept asserts that customers will choose products which are available and highly affordable. It means that management should focus on improving production and distribution efficiency.

2) The product concept

As stated in Kotler et,al (2004), consumers prefer products which has the best quality, performance and features, which requires organisation to do its utmost to improve product continuously.

3) The selling concept

A large-scale selling and promotion effort have to be undertaken to attract consumers to buy enough of the organisation's products.

4) The marketing concept

The needs and wants of target markets as well as delivering the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than competitors largely determine the organisational goals achievement.

5) The societal marketing concept

This concept adds the maintenance of the consumer's and society's well-being into the marketing concept.

It is well-acknowledged that marketing has been experiencing a number of