Importance of Marketing in Business World

Importance of Marketing in Business World and Challenge of Marketers Today

By FONG Jia Ling

        “Marketing is 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” (Boone and Kurtz, 2013:7). Undoubtedly, businesses cannot survive without marketing. Today, Malaysia’s recruitment market is expected to see strong hiring of sales and marketing professionals (Jayaram, 2016). The job post related such as personal selling, strategic planning, advertising and many more.

        The role of marketing and its relevance stated apparently from marketing definition above. The primary importance is satisfying consumer needs. Maslow (1943) suggested that needs can be categorised along a hierarchy and more refined needs are demanded once basic needs are fulfilled. In 21st century, customer-led businesses are more attract consumers compared to product-led businesses.  Focusing on consumers’ needs is the goal as customers are the heart of every business. By adopting appropriate marketing strategies and techniques, such as consumer behaviour analysis can help the business to understand its customers well. Business can communicate with customer by advertising. So, it attracts the customers if the business’ products meet their preferences. If the product’s quality and after-sales services are excellent, it will gain high customer loyalty and encourage brand recall. Sony conducts surveys to determine customer satisfaction at various touchpoints, and makes improvements based on the survey results in its efforts to continually improve customer satisfaction (Sony, 2016).

Next, marketing creates brand awareness. Consumer knowledge on product offered is vital. Businesses must have good understanding on demographic groups of consumers and apply marketing expenditure to media to serve the groups. TESCO hypermarket distributes the catalogues in housing area to reinforce customers’ knowledge about their product and encourage purchase from them. Hill (2011) suggested repetition can create brand awareness. The more the consumers see the communication, the higher chance the sales can be generated.  The business can initiate CSR as marketing tool to increase brand awareness. Colgate sponsors toothpastes to primary schools and teaches the students on brushing teeth is one of the way of CSR, contributing to the society, at the same time, increase brand awareness.

Besides, marketing helps business in expressing competitive advantages. The marketing message delivered must stressed the reasons consumer should purchase the product. Hill (2011) also highlighted that stressed-on competitors’ shortcoming as another popular tactic for it. If product is excellent, the consumers would do “free advertising” by word of mouth. The customer base would be built. The business will gain brand recognition and stand at competitive edge among its competitors. For example, Joy dishwashing liquid stressed on extra-cleanliness with one-drop liquid and compare with Brand “X” in the advertisement successfully attract the consumer to buy Joy (xilverice, 2016).