Marketing is a set of processes or activities that work to discover customer desires and develop a range of products or services that satisfy those desires and generate profits for the organization within a suitable timeframe. Marketing can be defined as the art of selling, although sales are only one part of the process.
From a societal perspective, marketing is the link between the material needs of society and responding to economic patterns by delivering the value of a product or service to customers. Marketing can be considered a business function of an organization and a set of mechanisms that create and deliver value to customers and deal with customers in a way that benefits the organization and its shareholders. As a science, marketing is the process of identifying the target market through market analysis and segmentation, understanding customer trends, and providing them with high value.
There are five contrasting concepts that an organization can follow when adopting marketing policies: the production concept, the product concept, the sales concept, the marketing concept, and the overall marketing concept. The latter has four components: relationship marketing, internal marketing, integrated marketing, and socially responsive marketing. The set of interconnected elements necessary for managing a successful marketing process includes: developing a clear marketing concept, communicating with customers, building strong brands, shaping long-term growth, developing and delivering value, creating long-term growth, and establishing appropriate marketing strategies and plans.
Marketing processes include:
Market organization
Supervision and control
Planning and marketing
Marketing information and research
Financing marketing operations
Types of companies in marketing implementation
Companies that do not currently implement marketing extensively and are unlikely to do so or use it much in the long term. These companies are geared towards other companies like themselves; that is, the model they use is the business-to-business (B2B) model.
These companies do indeed implement marketing (any company in the world implements marketing, even if only to a small degree), but these companies remain in a certain mold. They do not want to build a name that ordinary people know, and therefore they find the goal of reputation or spread – brand awareness – undesirable. They are satisfied with some companies that will bring them huge profits or at least enough every year. They are happy with that. They will choose the best sales people they meet and will bring them into the companies targeted by their services and products. This is what they want, and this is a model in which it is difficult to implement marketing in its enjoyable form.
