Introduction
Marketing refers to the commercial processes involved in promoting and selling and distributing a product or service. It is basically the mechanism through which producers of commodities and service providers build up consumer interest in their goods and/or services.
Marketing comes up with an elaborate and systematic course of action that forms the base for sales methods, business communication and enterprise growth. It is an incorporated practice by way of which firms establish and develop solid client affiliations and build value for their commodity and service consumers and for themselves.
Marketing application was perceived as a creative trade in years gone by and it involved promotions, circulation and general trading. However, with the advancement of intellectual study in marketing, there is a wide scale use of other sciences like psychology, economics, mathematics, among others, which end up making marketing a science in itself.
Nevertheless, marketing is also interconnected to many of the imaginative arts. Marketing literature is normally proficient at recreating itself and its lexicon in relation to the prevailing times and the culture.
The whole process commences with marketing exploration and passes through market partitioning, commerce arrangement and implementation, finishing up with pre and after-sales promotional undertakings.
The role of marketing
The main purpose of marketing is to identify the consumer of a product or service, to retain the client, and to gratify him or her. With the customer as the spotlight of any business, it is therefore appropriate to conclude that marketing is a key element of the running of such establishments. Over time, marketing developed to meet up the stasis in growing new marketplaces brought about by already developed client bases and overproduction of commodities and services.
Marketing strategies
Taking up and practicing of marketing schemes and strategies calls for business establishments to alter their emphasis from just production to the observed needs and wants of the commodity and/or service end users as the way of staying gainful.
Attaining organizational aspirations is usually dependent on establishing the needs and wants of the target clientele and working toward achieving them. Any business organization needs to satisfy the needs of its customers in a much better way than its competitors in the marketplace. This is what gives a distinction between good and bad marketing approaches.
Approaches used in the past are generally considered to be below par as compared to their contemporary counterparts. These approaches have had to change with time in line with consumer tastes. The earlier strategies were namely; the production approach, the commodity/service approach and the selling approach. In the production orientation, the profit driver(s) lay in the production processes.
An establishment laying emphasis on this orientation specialize focuses on generating as much as possible of a given commodity or a service(s). The company in question basically takes advantage of the economies of scale, ensuring that the least effective scale is hit. This approach is effective when a high demand for a commodity or service is in the offing and there is a certainty that customer likes do not swiftly alter.
The mainstay of the product approach is the commodity or service quality. An establishment using this approach assumes that so long as its commodity(s) and/or services are of acceptable quality then customers will always buy them.
Selling methods are the profit drivers in the selling approach. A firm employing this lays emphasis on the selling or promotion of a given commodity or service, minus establishing new customer wants or needs. As a result, this involves selling an already present commodity/service by use promotion skills. This orientation is not the best as it relies on likelihood that changes in customer likes and wants leading to a reduction in demand will not arise.
Good marketing has various approaches which include; relationship marketing which lays the spotlight on the consumer, business marketing which lays emphasis on an establishment or a firm and the social marketing approach that has its emphasis on the society. The mainstay of the relationship marketing orientation is establishing and maintaining good customer relations.
The entire association between suppliers and consumers is normally under focus here, with the intention being to provide the best possible consideration, consumer services and thus ensure client devotion.
In the business marketing orientation, establishment and maintenance of relationships between firms or companies is the main profit driver. In such a set up, marketing occurs between organizations. The commodity or service focus is on industrial goods or services rather than end user products.
The profit driver for social marketing is normally the gain for the society at large. The approach has the same attributes as the marketing approach but has an additional provision that there will be no detrimental activities to society in the commodity itself and all other processes involved in getting the product to the end user.
Conclusion
Good marketing needs to focus on the customer or the end user of a commodity or service. With this, a lasting relation between the producer/marketer and the client will be created. With the advancement of technology, marketing needs to be taken to an even higher level by use of the worldwide web through internet marketing, commonly referred to as e-marketing. More precise target on an audience is easy to achieve in such cases.