What Is Marketing?
Marketing refers to the activities a company performs to promote the purchase or sale of its products or services. Marketing includes advertising and allows companies to sell products and services to consumers, other businesses and organizations.
Professionals working in a company’s marketing and promotions department seek to attract the attention of key potential audiences through advertising. Promotional campaigns target specific audiences and may involve celebrities endorsing products, catchy slogans or catchphrases, memorable exterior packaging or attractive graphic designs, and overall media exposure.
Marketing as a discipline involves all the actions a company takes to attract customers and maintain a relationship with them. Connecting with potential or past customers is also an important part of the job and may include writing return emails, having coffee with a potential customer, returning a customer’s phone call or email quickly, and meeting with a customer for a chat or meal.
In plain English, marketing is about matching a company’s products and services with customers who want them, pairing products with customers’ needs, and ultimately ensuring profitability.
A company’s product is one or more items that the company plans to offer to its customers . The product should seek to fulfill a gap in the market or to satisfy a greater consumer demand for an existing product. Before preparing a proper marketing campaign, the marketer needs to understand the purpose of the product being sold, how it stands out from its competitors, whether the product can also be paired with a secondary product or product line, and whether there are alternatives in the market.
Price is often the key to a company’s ability to sell a product. In setting prices, companies must consider unit cost price, marketing costs, and distribution expenses. The company must also consider the prices of competing products in the marketplace and whether the price points they offer are sufficient to provide consumers with a reasonable choice.
Marketing activities, of course, include a variety of activities such as advertising, sales, promotion, public relations, direct marketing, sponsorship and guerrilla marketing.
Promotional activities vary depending on the stage of the product life cycle in which the product finds itself. Marketers understand that consumers associate the price and distribution of a product with its quality, and they must take this into account when developing their overall marketing strategy.
