What is Marketing?
- A positive, outward looking, innovative and highly competitive attitude toward the conduct of exchange transactions;
- A continuous recognition that the conduct of business operations must revolve around the long-run interests of customers;
- Understanding that the achievement of profits and other organisational goals result from customer satisfaction and customer retention;
- An outward looking, responsive attitude to events in the external business environment within which an organisation operates, especially the actions of competitors;
- An understanding of the balance to be achieved between the need to earn profits from existing assets and the equally important need to adapt an organisation to achieve future profits, recognising social and environmental resource constraints;
Marketing is especially relevant to the market conditions of the new millennium
- Market saturation
- High competition
- Increasing choice
Marketing facilitates the efficient conduct of business
- Integration and co-ordination with other core business functions backed up by management commitment to quality and long-run customer satisfaction.
Marketing comprises three main elements linked within a system of exchange transactions
- The attitudes and decisions of customers concerning the perceived value of available goods and services, according to their needs, wants and interests, and ability to pay.
- The attitudes and decisions of producers concerning their production of goods and services for sale, in the context of their business environment and long-term objectives.
- The ways in which producers communicate with consumers, before, during, and after the point of sale, and distribute or provide access to their products.
Marketing is concerned with long-term (strategy) and short-term (tactics)
- The short term may be defined as the period of time in which an organisation is able to make only marginal alterations to its product specifications, production capacity and published prices;
- In the long term, organisations may decide to alter product specifications, production capacity, introduce new products or phase out old ones, alter its pricing strategy or change its position within a market.
