Concept of Marketing

"Marketing" is an instructive business domain that serves to inform and educate target markets about the value and competitive advantage of a company and its products. “Value” is worth derived by the customer from owning and using the product. “Competitive Advantage” is a depiction that the company or its products are each doing something better than their competition in a way that could benefit the customer.

Marketing is focused on the task of conveying pertinent company and product related information to specific customers, and there are a multitude of decisions (strategies) to be made within the marketing domain regarding what information to deliver, how much information to deliver, to whom to deliver, how to deliver, when to deliver, and where to deliver. Once the decisions are made, there are numerous ways (tactics) and processes that could be employed in support of the selected strategies.

As Marketing is often misinterpreted as just advertising or sales, Chris Newton, in What is marketing? (Marketing Help Online, 2008), defined marketing as every strategy and decision made in the following twelve areas:

* Identifying and quantifying the need in the marketplace
* Identifying and quantifying the target markets
* Identifying the optimum cost effective media – online and offline - to reach the target markets
* Reviewing the priorities of the product offering in your overall product mix ‘matrix’
* Identifying and developing the most effective distribution channels, be they wholesaler networks, partnering alliances, franchising, or any number of conduits to the market.
* Testing different ways of packaging the concepts or products to find their most 'easy-to-sell' form
* Testing to find the optimum pricing strategies
* Developing effective promotional strategies and effective advertising and supporting collateral, offers, and launch strategies
* Developing and documenting the sales process
* Finding the optimum execution of the sales process – through testing of selling scripts, people selection, supporting collateral, skills and attitudinal training, tracking, measuring and refining
* Ensuring that sales projections reflect realistic production capacities
* Developing nurture programs to optimise the lifetime value of the customer

The goal of marketing is to build and maintain a preference for a company and its products within the target markets. The goal of any business is to build mutually profitable and sustainable relationships with its customers. While all business domains are responsible for accomplishing this goal, the marketing domain bears a significant share of the responsibility.

Within the larger scope of its definition, marketing is performed through the actions of three coordinated disciplines named: “Product Marketing”, “Corporate Marketing”, and “Marketing Communications”.