Marketing

Marketing is the activity, set of institution and process of creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society. Marketing in providing value must be balance for both customers and shareholders. Before creating value for customers, first a marketer needs to understand marketplace and customers’ needs and wants. Needs are states of felt deprivation and according to Abraham Maslow, there are 5 hierarchy of needs. In order of importance, they are physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self-actualisation.  Most people will try to satisfy the most important needs first before continue to the next stage. Wants are the form taken by human needs and they are shaped by individual personality and culture. Further, wants that are backed with buying power and willingness to buy become demands.

In creating value, marketer needs to look at microenvironment and macro environment which may give impacts on market’s demand and marketing decision. Microenvironment consists of actors close to organisation that affect its ability to serve customers. Those actors are marketing organisation, marketing intermediaries, publics, competitors and customers. For instance, marketer should pay attention to competitors’ activity and construct strategy to provide greater value and satisfaction then competitors do to customers. The larger societal forces such as demographic, economic, natural, technological, cultural and political that affect the whole microenvironment is called macro environment. Marketer must notice trends that happen in the macro environment as it will affect the marketing decisions. Trends such as shortages of raw materials, fast pace in technology change, and shift in culture values will affect the marketing decisions.

Besides knowing the environment impact in making decision, marketing managers also need information about customer wants, market demands, and competitor. Information can be obtained from internal records, marketing intelligence and market research. Both internal records and marketing intelligence are secondary data which have already existed beforehand.  Marketing research is conducted currently to get required information. Marketing research has three types of approach which are observational research, survey research and experimental research. Observational research is used to gather primary data by observing people, actions and situations and to meet exploratory objectives. Survey research is the approach best suited to gather descriptive information. The last approach is experimental research which is best suited to gather causal information or cause and effect relationship. There are several ways of contact to collect information such as mail, telephone, personal interview or online. Marketer should consider the strength and weakness of each contact methods. For example, mail flexibility is poor as it takes long time to deliver the mail to respondents but it has strong advantage where no interviewer is involved therefore there will be no bias on the answers.