What is Marketing ?

 Q1: What is Marketing? What are its primary goals?

OR

Define Marketing. Discuss the important objectives of marketing?

DEFINITION OF MARKETING:

According to Philip Kotler:

“The process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return”.

OR

According to William J. Stanton:

“Marketing is the total system of business activities designed to plan, price, promote, and distribute want satisfying products to target markets in order to achieve organizational objectives”.

OR

According to American Marketing Association:

“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”.

OLD CONCEPT VS NEW CONCEPT OF MARKETING:

Difference of Selling and Marketing:

In old days, marketing was just considered as selling goods to consumers by using attractive words and

diverting consumer’s attention to the product. But now-a-days, marketing is no more a selling activity.

Selling is considered as just a tip of marketing ice-burg. Now, marketing involves creating profitable

customer relationships by satisfying needs of customers through a valuable product.

Difference between advertising and Marketing:

Some people, who are not familiar with actual definition of marketing, consider that marketing is just

making an effective advertisement and publishing it on different media at effective rates. Core concept of

marketing is entirely different. Advertising is just a part of marketing, not a whole of marketing. It is

included in a small description of one of the 4Ps of marketing 

1. COORDINATED MARKETING EFFORTS:

One of the important objectives of marketing is to develop an effective coordination and harmony among all

the marketing activities so that we can maintain profitable customer relationship by delivering them a valuable

product. It is necessary because we have to generate value in every step of the process otherwise delivering

value to customers will not be possible. This is called TQM (Total Quality Management).

As explained by William J. Stanton, it is a system of implementing an organization-wide commitment to

quality that involves every employee accepting responsibility for continuous quality improvement. Consider, we have best suppliers of raw material for our product. It is essential to have up-to-date

machinery, people and other overheads for having value in processing. After that, we must have distributors that

create value through their services. At the end, after creation of value at every step, we will be able to deliver

actual value that a customer is expecting us to deliver.

For Example: Walmart, cannot deliver its products at low prices i.e., value for customers, unless it

successfully creates value at every step of its process. Similar is the case with TCS, which tries to create value

at every station to make timely delivery of parcels possible.

a) Quality product

Building a quality product for customer can be an aim of the business. Customer may consider quality of a

product as its value. Customer may define quality of a product in many ways. Like a person can say that it is a

measure of excellence or a state of being free from defects, deficiencies and significant variations. It can also be

defined as the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bears its ability to satisfy

stated or implied needs.

Although most firms don’t ignore quality of the firm. But we must have to consider the acceptable levels of

quality for customers determined by our engineers and manufacturing people. It is necessary because if quality

of a product goes up, its cost also goes up. But increase in cost relative to quality can be controlled through

affective marketing, like:

i) Assessing customer’s point of view of quality:

Marketing can help marketer by obtaining and responding to input from customers about how they

define quality and what they expect in a particular product.

ii) Reducing problems of Production processes:

Marketing can help marketer by improving designs to reduce problems in manufacturing, and

identifying and correcting problems early in the production process to reduce excessive reworking

and wastes.

iii) Call employee’s attention towards quality:

Marketing can help marketer by Encouraging employees to call attention to quality problems, and

empowering them to initiate action to improve quality.

Marketers’ determine that return on quality can be measured which is a refined form of TQM.