LESSON 1: Understanding Corporate marketing

MARKETING

Pride and Ferrell, (2015) sees marketing as the process of creating, distributing, promoting and pricing goods, services, and ideas to facilitate satisfying exchange relationships with customers and to develop and maintain favorable relationships with stakeholders in a dynamic environment.

Marketing is also observed to be an activity because it is a process of engagement of marketing activities and strategies that result in making products available that will satisfy customers while making profits for the companies that offer those products. Marketing activities are numerous and  varied because they basically include everything needed to get a product off the drawing board and into the hands of the customer.

The board field of the marketing includes activities such as:

• Designing the product and services so it will be desirable to customer by using tools such as marketing research and pricing
• Promoting the product so people will know about it by using tools such as public relations advertising, and marketing communications
• Selling a price and letting potential customers know about your product or service and making it available to them.Marketing is poised as getting the right goods and services to the right people at the right place, at the right time, with the right communication and promotion. This definition suggests marketing as the creation, development and delivery of products and services that satisfy the needs and wants of the customer, at a profit.

  In reference from this definition also suggests that customers are the focal point of every organization. They always have to identify with and define their products as what they do to satisfy customers but not as what organizations make or produce.

  A market on the other hand has different meanings to different sets of people. It is described in terms of place, monetary value, location, and demand for a product or level of exchange or time.

  For example, a marketer defines a market as a set of actual and potential buyers of an offer; while an economist defines mainly on issues of conduct, performance or structure of the market.

  For a definition and clear meaning of market, let us examine the following terms:

  ❖ Market – the business of selling and buying commodities (products and services). It is not confined to space, locally and time.

  ❖ Internet – The internet enables market to be in cyber space, 24 hours a day (interactive online marketing)

  ❖ Marketer – A person who promotes sales

  ❖ Market economy – this is where sales occur with less interventions from authorities

  ❖ Marketable – commodities fit to be offered for sale or services from the business of moving goods and services from the producer to the customer. It involves the act of promoting sales of commodities, including research, advertising and packaging.

FUNCTIONS OF MARKETING

The fundamental marketing goal is to capture and retain customers’ profitability. Marketing has the following functions:

❖Marketing research establishes the needs and wants and the target market

❖Product development creates the specifications to satisfy the target market.

❖Manufacturing makes the products in accordance with specifications.

❖Branding attaches an identity that differentiates the products from competitors.

❖Advertising communicates brand value and benefits.

❖Promotion stimulates consumer demand and repeatedly purchases.

❖Sales and distribution ensures products are mad available at retail outlets.

❖Logistics delivers the products cost-efficiency on a timely basis.

❖Merchandising maintains products quality and freshness at the retail outlets.

❖Consumer service provides support for the products to reinforce customer value.

ENTITIES THAT ARE GENERALLY MARKETED 

• Goods: Any physical product.
• Services: All professional services provided by professionals or organizations.
• Events: Trade shows, contracts, sports, etc.
• Organizations: Corporate, Business Concerns, Universities, Museums, etc.
• Places: Countries, States, Cities etc.
• Properties: Real Estate, Stocks etc.
• Persons: Celebrity marketing.
• Experiences: Theme parks, theme hotels, amusement parks, water parks etc.
• Information: Information about every possible aspect.
• Ideas: Family planning, AIDS awareness, prevention of drugs, smoking and drinking, sex education, etc.CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF MARKETING

  A marketing framework is a visual representation or logical flow of your marketing plan. It contains several components that work together as a whole to bring your marketing vision to reality. By taking the time write a marketing framework, your options for marketing your business, products and services can become clearer and you can create an actionable plan for promoting your products or services.

  While the pragmatic marketing framework provides a standard language for your entire product/service team and a blue print of the key activities needed to bring profitable, problem-oriented products to market; the marketing exchange is the act of obtaining a desired object from someone by offering of value in return. Several marketing concepts with management orientations have been articulated by marketing experts under whom organizations can conduct their marketing activity. These include the production concept, the product concept, the selling concept and the marketing and societal marketing concept.

  1.THE PRODUCTION CONCEPT 

  This is one of the oldest concepts guiding sellers. It is a management orientation that assumes that consumers will favor those productions which are available and affordable, and that the major task of management is the pursuance of improved production and distribution efficiency. The implicit presumptions of this concept to the organizations are:

  ❖ Consumers are primarily interested in product availability and low price.

  ❖ Consumers’ all know the price of the competing brands, and the organization’s task is to keep improving production and distribution efficiency and lowering costs as the key to attracting and holding customers. Organizations should therefore focus their main energy on achieving work efficiency without introduction of impersonality and consumer insensitivity.

  2. THE PRODUCT CONCEPT

  This concept assumes most customer will favor those products that offer the most quality for the price, and therefore the organization should focus its efforts on improving product/service quality. The concept indicates that consumers are primarily interested in product quality, and know the quality and feature differences amongst the competing products. Products are chosen on the basis of obtaining the most quality for their money. However, in reality, organizations are

  expected not to operate solely on a product concept because consumers do not automatically learn about new or improved products, believing that they are really superior or show a willingness to pay a higher price.

  The organization with a better product will not progress unless it takes positive steps to design, package, and price the new product attractively, place it into convenient distribution channels, and bring it to the attraction of the customers concerned. Likewise, it is expected that the organization should have first determined whether the new product was needed to solve this problem effectively.

  3.THE SELLING CONCEPT

  This concept assumes that customers will either not buy or buy enough of the organizational products unless the organization makes substantial efforts to stimulate their interest in its products.

  The organization achieves this by:

  1. a) Inducing consumers to buy more through various sales stimulating devices or;
  2. b) Make consumers tend to resist buying most things that are not essential.It is therefore Management’s task to have a strong sale-oriented or focused department that makes it important to attracting and holding customers. Organizations practicing this concept often assume that their products are “sold” not “bought”. This is because potential customers are sought for and while the benefits of the products aren’t the main reason of selling.

     Unfortunately, great risks abound in practicing the selling concepts especially in its hard driving form, since customer’s satisfaction is considered secondary to obtaining a sale. This eventuality spoils the market of the seller in the long run, because there is often no repeat purchase by the buyer. The buyer in this situation is either coerced or sweet talked into buying something which ordinarily is not needed. The item may eventually not be used and no repeat purchase is envisaged.

     4.THE MARKETING CONCEPT

     This is a business philosophy that challenges the above three business orientations. The central tenets were crystallized in the 1950s with the underlying objective that for an organization to be effective in sales, it must understand what the needs and wants of consumers are. In essence, organization understands her competitors and their strategies in such a way that it produces or creates goods needed by consumers, then delivers the product while communicating customer value to its selected target customers. The marketing concept rest on four pillars: target market, customer needs, integrated marketing and profitability.

     Distinctions between the sales concept and the marketing concept: 

     • The sales concept focuses on the needs of the seller but the marketing concept focuses on the needs of the buyer.
     • The sales concept is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his/her product into cash.

     The marketing concept is preoccupied with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product as a solution to the customer’s problem (needs). The marketing concept represents the major change in today’s company orientation

     that provides the foundation to achieve competitive advantage. This philosophy is the foundation of consultative selling. The marketing concept has evolved into a fifth and more refined company orientation. This concept is more theoretical and will undoubtedly influence future forms of marketing and selling approaches. It is an organizational wide commitment to reaching and responding to customer needs.

     5. 5. THE SOCIETAL MARKETING CONCEPT

     While marketing concept lays emphasis on consumer satisfaction, this concept argues for an extension of the focus of marketing. Achieving the full profit potential of each customer relationship should be the fundamental goal of every marketing strategy. It calls on organizations to focus more on consumer well- being which his satisfaction may not accommodate.

     Organizations are encouraged by this concept to look beyond extant consumer satisfaction to his long-run well-being and the well- being of the larger society. Organizations should not strive to satisfy their objectives at the expense of the society. In furtherance of the aspiration, organizations are to reconcile consumer satisfaction and their own objective with social and environmental considerations.