What is marketing?

Marketing can be defined as matching the strengths of the company and its product to the customers within their target market. Marketing is done to anticipate and satisfy customer needs.

Oriented Marketing

Marketing can be oriented.

• Product oriented marketing involves promoting products or services based on the companies own strengths and requirements. Products are made based how the company wants them to be, rather than with the aim of the customer in mind.
• Market oriented companies develop their products or services based on the wants and needs of the customer. Market research is used a lot to ensure their products meet customer requirements in order for them to satisfied.

Market Research

Market research is a key area of marketing. It involves the gathering, analysis and presentation of information relevant to the market the business is in. Market research can be done in two ways.

• Primary research is when a company gathers the data for the first time.
• Secondary research is when a company uses data that has already been gathered.

Analysing the Market

• Market analysis involves the examination of conditions and data within a market.
• A market segment is an identifiable group of customers in a market with similar needs and wants.
• The size of a market can be measured by checking the volume of products sold, or the value of products sold in that market over a particular time period.

Aims, objectives and strategies

Businesses need somewhere to aim when marketing. For this reason they set objectives and strategies.

• An objective gets set – this is their target, which is often related to the corporate objectives.
• Marketing strategies are long-term plans, which contain details on how the marketing objectives will be met.
• Marketing tactics are short term actions that are taken to help achieve the marketing strategy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.