Marketing Process

Marketing can be seen as a constant series of actions and reactions between the customers and the producing companies which are trying to satisfy their needs. The customers make their needs or problems known and the companies make it their business to receive the information. The firms use their resources money, materials, skills, and ingenuity to develop ways of satisfying the needs. Companies must then communicate the existence of the ‘solution’ back to the customers, whose needs created the ‘problem’ in the first place. Customer will gladly pay for the solutions to their problems or satisfaction of their needs.

Marketing can consist of many activities: selling, transportation, storage, risk taking, gathering market information, etc. The marketing sub-system has a major objective in getting the products of a company in the hands of consumers. This can include sending out information through advertising and personal selling, pricing the products, transporting and storing products to meet consumers’ needs.

Marketing provides the match between the organization’s human, financial and physical resources and the wants of customers. This includes gathering data about direct and indirect competition, economic uncertainties, legal and political and other constraints. All this must be done against an environmental background of change and uncertainty. An organization communicates with target markets by a combination of personal selling, advertising, sales promotion and publicity. Personal selling is communication between a salesperson and a customer regarding the company and its products.

Marketing cannot be done without gathering accurate data about the market and potential customers and the necessary information will be acquired through the all important marketing research. The next step is to provide satisfactions by offering the correct marketing mix: the right product, at the right price, available in the right places and promoted in the right way. The provision of satisfactions by developing the correct marketing mix depends on the full exploitation of all the possibilities of developing differential advantages, through product, pricing policies, distribution and promotion. The marketing mix, in turn, depends on effective market segmentation to single out a group of people who are believed to have similar wants and needs for a product.