Introduction to Marketing and Marketing Management

Introduction to Marketing and Marketing Management includes topics like marketing concepts, management, and the evolution of marketing concepts.

Marketing is about identifying and meeting human and social needs. To put it simply, it is “meeting needs profitability”. 

The American Marketing Association refers to it as “ Marketing is the activity, the set of instructions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” Here, exchanges refer to the considerable amount of work and skill.

In the socialistic view, “Marketing is a societal process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering, and freely exchanging products and services of value with others. The co-creation of value among customers with businesses has been more important in the modern marketing era.

Meaning of Marketing Management:

It is the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value. 

Marketing management comes when at least one party to a potential exchange thinks about the means of achieving desired responses from the other parties.

Evolution of the Marketing philosophies (marketing concepts):

The firms are customer and market-driven nowadays. Concepts such as brand equity, customer value analysis, database marketing, e-commerce, value networks, supply chain management, and integrated management communication were not even part of the marketing vocabulary then. Marketing management continues to change in the marketing discipline over the past fifty years.

Customers are now telling firms what type of products they seek, when they want, how they want to get delivered, and how they want to pay. It has been the most concern on the customer. Firm messages are becoming a smaller fraction of conversation about products and services.

Companies have shifted gears on focusing on customer portfolios from managing product portfolios. They are handling customers’ databases about the response and trying better to understand customer beliefs with the use of emails, blogs, podcasts, and other media.

They are also concerned with the ethical and social implications of their marketing decisions.

As similar as company changes, marketing organization has also. Marketing is no longer a department to handle limited tasks, it is a company-wide undertaking. Marketing drives the company’s vision, mission, and strategic planning. It decides on whom to sell, what products to offer, what prices to set, what communication channels to use, what channels of distribution, and what partnerships to develop. Marketing succeeds only when all the other department works the best. Like finance department furnishes the required fund, engineering designs the right products, the production makes high quality on time, and accounting measures the profitability on different customers, products, and areas.

Core Marketing concepts:

• Needs, Wants, and Demands
• Target Markets, Positioning, and Segmentation
• Offerings and BrandsMarketing Channels
• Paid, Owned, and Earned Media
• Impressions and Engagement
• Value and Satisfaction
• Supply Chain
• Competition, and
• Marketing Environment

a. Needs, Wants, and Demands

Humans tend to have very basic needs like food, clothing, and a house. But, it becomes wants they specify the particular to satisfy their needs. For example, Nepali consumers need food but they want a ‘Dal Bhat Tarkari with Achar’. Here, the thing is our wants are always shaped by the society we live in.

Demands are wants for specific products backed by an ability to pay the price. Many want a Mercedes-Benz; only a few can buy one. So, companies must focus on how many are willing to buy rather than how many people want their products.

Some customers might ask for the need if they don’t know themselves in full detail. So, marketers must probe further. We can distinguish five types of needs:

1. Stated needs: customer wants a cheap suit.
2. Real needs: customer wants a car whose operating cost, not the initial price, is low.
3. Unstated needs: customer wants to be felt having a good service. 
4. Delight needs: the customer would be delighted if a car has an onboard GPS system.
5. Secret needs: the customer wants to be seen as a savvy customer.

b. Target Markets, Positioning, and Segmentation

Marketers always find distinct segments of buyers by identifying demographic, psychological, and behavioral differences between them. They decide which segments present the greatest opportunities. For each of the target markets, the company develops a market offering that it positions in target buyers’ minds as delivering some key benefits. 

Volvo makes its cars for safety concerned people and Porshe develops its cars for pleasure and excitement in the drive. 

c. Offerings and Brands

The company decides to put forward a value proposition, a set of benefits to satisfy needs. The intangible propositions can be made by an offering, which can be a combination of products, services, information, and experiences.

A brand is an offering from a well-known source. A brand name such as Gucci carries different kinds of perspectives in people’s minds that they create an image like creative, cool, fancy, over the odds, etc. Therefore, all companies struggle to build their company’s brand as a really fascinating image or message to all the customers to have prosperity in business.

d. Marketing Channels

Marketers put three different kinds of channels for marketing. They are as follows:

1. Communication Channel
2. Distribution Channel
3. Service Channel

Communication channels deliver and receive messages from target buyers and include newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, email, phones, posters, billboards, CDs, audiotapes, and the Internet. Furthermore, firms communicate through websites and other media, adding dialogue channels such as email, blogs, text messages, URLs to familiar monologue channels such as ads.

Distribution Channel delivers or sells the physical product to the buyer or requested customers. These channels include Internet, mail, mobile phone, or any indirect contact with distributors, wholesalers, retailers, and agents as intermediaries. 

Service Channel is for caring out the transactions with potential buyers. That includes warehouses, transportation, companies, banks, and insurance companies. 

Marketers face a designing challenge in having the best mix of communication, distribution, and service channels for their offerings.

 e. Paid, Owned, and Earned Media

With the rise of global media, marketers have found a variety of ways to impress customers. There are basically three types of media.

Paid Media refers to TV, magazines, display ads, paid search, and sponsorships that the firm has paid to the digital media for doing so.

Owned Media refers to media that are actually owned by a company like Facebook, Twitter, websites, brand brochure, etc.

Earned Media is actually those media formed voluntarily as they want to have the company philosophy or they really praise the company’s work. So, they are streams in which customers, outsiders willingly share about the company via mouth to mouth, social media, viral marketing methods.

f. Impressions and Engagement

Impressions are the tool to track the scope or breadth of communication’s reach that occurs after the customer view a communication. The downside is that impressions which don’t provide any insight into the results of communication.

On the other hand, engagement is the extent of a customer’s attention and active interest in communication. It reflects a much more active response and creates value for the firms. 

Some online engagement measure tools are tweets on Twitter, likes on Facebook, comments in web blogs, etc.

g. Value and Satisfaction

The buyer chooses the offerings he or she perceives to deliver the most value, the sum of the tangible and intangible benefits and costs. In marketing concepts, value is primarily a combination of quality, service, and price (qsp) called the customer value triad. The value increases with quality and services but decreases with a price.

Marketing can be looked at from the perspective to identify, create, communicate, deliver and monitor customer value.

Satisfaction reflects a person’s judgment about a product’s performance and his or her expectations of the product. If it matches, the firm succeeded in marketing, otherwise, it fails.

h. Supply Chain

It is a channel stretched from raw materials to finished goods to customers. 

i. Competiton

The competition includes all the actual and potential rival offerings and substitutes a buyer might consider. 

j. Marketing Environment

The task environment includes the actors engaged in producing, distributing, and promoting the offering. Suppliers group contains material suppliers and service suppliers, like marketing research agencies, advertising agencies, banks, and telecommunication companies. Distributors include agents, brokers, manufacturer representatives, and others to facilitate finding and selling to customers. 

The broad environment includes six components: demographic environment, economic environment, socio-cultural environment, natural environment, technological environment, and political-legal environment. 

Holistic marketing concepts

It is based on the development, design, and implementation of marketing programs, processes, and activities that recognize their breadth and independencies. It has a concept that “everything matters in marketing and that broad concept is often necessary.”

Areas of holistic marketing concepts:

1. Internal marketing (Marketing department, Senior management, Other departments)
2. Integrated marketing(Products & Services, Communications, Channels, Price)
3. Performance marketing(Sales revenue, brand & customer equity, ethics, environment, legal, social)
4. Relationship marketing(customers, employees, partners, financial community)

This concept basically means these four areas must be thoroughly maintained to have prosperity in the marketing world.

Tasks of marketing management:

• Develop marketing strategies and plans
• Capturing marketing insights
• Connecting with customers
• Building strong brands
• Creating value
• Delivering value
• Communicating value
• Conducting marketing responsibly for long term success

This is all the contents included in Introduction to Marketing and Marketing Management by the syllabus of Pokhara University.

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