MARKETING

Marketing

Marketing

Introduction

Marketing plays a very major role in the success of any company. There are so many top tier companies operating in the world, which have built their position and made their mark in the world by doing heavy marketing of their products and services. In order to keep their businesses alive, companies need heavily to invest in their marketing activities. Advertising and promotion are one of the main marketing activities of a company. These activities involve a lot of time, innovative thinking, and most importantly cost. Companies, through advertising and promotion activities, connect to their customers. Advertising means to communicate with your customers about the products your business is offering. In order for companies and businesses to survive and sell their products, companies and businesses need heavily to invest in advertising activities. Advertising helps businesses make its products familiar to their customers. On the other hand, promotions refer to retaining your existing customers and attracting your previous customers (Dunn, 2012, pp.1-6).

All of these activities mentioned are branches of marketing. However, marketing is not only limited to advertising and promotional activities, it also involves analysis of product markets, analyzing new trends, devising market strategies to enter the product in market, and setting prices of products (McCarthy & Perreault, 1990, pp.68-96). There is a trend which has recently come in to practice to target international markets while devising the marketing strategies. There could be many reasons for this shift in activities. However, we will analyze and focus our discussion and analysis on the most major reason behind this shift. Before the discussion and analysis, this paper will include a definition of marketing, discussion of basics of marketing, and an analysis of marketing trends.

Discussion

According to the (American Marketing Association, 2007) the definition of marketing is, “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large”. This definition of marketing was updated in the year 2007 by the American Marketing Association. The previous definition which exited was introduced in the year 2004, which states that, “Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders”. This change in definition by the association provides a proof of the fact that marketing is not just limited to a function of a department in an organization (Frederick E. Webster, 1992, pp.1-17). The new definition also stressed on the fact that the scope of marketing is not just limited to short term benefits. It is a cross functional activity which provides long term benefits to the company, businesses and organizations. Companies can bank on effective marketing for a very long period (Ruekert, 1990, pp.50-62). Good marketing leaves an impact on the customers and consumers, which stay on for a longer period. This definitely benefits the organization as more and more awareness of the companies and organization's services and products ...