Marketing is an important exercise in a company; it ensures that target customers access goods and services a company manufactures. Manufacturing can only take place if marketing department sells final products effectively. Marketing team also advises a company on the products on demand.
Marketing links customers and a company. Before this course, I thought that marketing is advertising for goods and service. I also believed that it stops when customers have realised the existence of certain products in the market. After the course, I have a better understanding of what marketing is. This paper gives a personal understanding of marketing.
Marketing
No single statement can explain what is marketing; briefly, it is a link between customers and a company, the feedback from either side is crucial in improving goods and services produced. It works back and forth where customers influence the company products and service and the company persuades customers to buy its products.
The number of stages involved in marketing varies; however, it involves the process taken from designing a product to delivery of such products to the target customers. When designing a marketing strategy, the most important thing is developing a market segment. This is a small group in the larger community that have similar attributes such as similar likes, values, age, income among other. Understanding market segment is important for product development.
The following are the main stages in marketing:
- Product design: in this stage, the company comes up with a product to sell to a certain market segment. The development is through an in-depth research and analysis of customers’ needs.
- Product promotion: in this stage, awareness of the products is the most important thing. Product promotion is through promotions and advertisements. This is to ensure that the customers are aware of a product in the market.
- Pricing, product differentiation, and distribution: in this stage, emphasis is on putting efforts to improve the quality and cost of the developed products to compete with similar products effectively.
Objectives of a marketing strategy
Some objectives of an efficient management strategy are:
- It aims at analysing internal and external environment that a business operates in, to device mechanisms for effective product communication to the target customers.
- It analysis consumer behaviour both in domestic and global markets to ensure that it advises its company effectively on the best practices to adopt to remain competitive
- Through marketing research, the department can advise other sections on product developments and the best approaches they should take to attain effective product differentiation.
- Through survey of the prevailing market conditions and analysing competitors, marketing assists a company in setting prices.
- It aims at advising a company in product development and differentiation.
An effective marketing strategy fulfils all the above-mentioned objectives not in isolation but all at a go. When all the objectives are met, a company gains a competitive advantage, as it is able to relate with its customers well.
Advantages of a marketing strategy
Marketing links a company to its target customers. If this link is not effective, there will be a breakdown of communication between these two parties. Information is power; marketing offers much needed information for strategic decisions. When producing goods, there is a target market that company aims. Human beings are not static; their needs change with time and space. Understanding of customers’ trend is important for an effective business.
When a company produces goods and services, it does so with the aim of selling. Creating awareness and persuading the customers to buy a company’s goods is the role of the marketing department. It thus ensures that the main objective of a business that is profit making is attained.
Marketing assist, a company to compete effectively and probably win the competition. How well a company persuades its customers goes a long way in determining whether customers favour it or not. To satisfy customers, marketers provide much needed information on which products are on demand, to assist the company make products that meet customer-changing needs.
For example, it advises a company when designing distribution channels, supply chain, and retiling systems. When determining the integrated marketing communications combinations to use then information from the marketing department is crucial.
Factors that limit the understanding of marketing among consumers and among other business disciplines
Other departments in a company have misunderstood marketing. They do not understand the role it plays in a company. In a company’s structure, marketing is not among the major department and has its importance limited to advertising. They fail to understand that marketing department assists in making strategic decision that give a company competitive advantage.
Customers see marketers as sales representatives; they do not understand they do more than just selling. They have the perception that marketers come to persuade them buys certain product. However, marketers are a link between a company and its customers. It is through marketing that a company understands the expectations of its target market.