Marketing Assignment

Marketing Assignment

Section 1

Marketing Process

Marketing has been defined as “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 (Chapter 1, pp. 8).” There are many people in the market who fail to understand the true meaning of marketing and confuse it with the concepts of advertising and personal selling but marketing actually is a much broader concept and mean a lot more than advertising of a product. It revolves around the ideology of transferring value for price to the customers in the form of their products, services and ideologies. Effective marketing is a win win situation for both internal and external stakeholders of organization such as customers, shareholders, suppliers, and employees. The most important thing behind effecting marketing process is identification of customer's wants and needs and satisfies them by providing suitable products and services. The prospective customers of organizations may include both type of customers, those who want to buy things for their personal use (consumers) and those who are buying it with a purpose of reselling (manufacturers). In other words marketing also refers to exchange of valuable things or trade of valuable things between buyers and sellers. Another most important thing that affects the marketing process of organization is the external environmental factors and market in which the company is operating. Such environmental factors include changes in the social, technological, economic and regulators forces. Additionally it also includes changes in the competing organizations which may affect organization's competitive advantage. It is very important that organizations find a competitive and effective balance between these environmental factors and the stakeholders. Finding the right balance is of utmost importance as providing low price products with highest quality and high rates to suppliers is not possible. This is why it is important to collect useful information with regards to customer's needs and preferences and this where marketing research comes into the picture (Times 100, pp. 102). A need is related to basic necessities of a person such as foods, shelter, clothing and security while wants is shaped by the surrounding culture, knowledge and personality traits of an individual. It is not practical to focus on every single individual that is why organizations focus on group of people with common needs and wants which the target audience or target market of the organization and the marketing program and plan of organization is developed and directed for and towards them. Marketing research helps in collection of the above mentioned details with regards to customer's needs and wants and develops the right marketing plan and mix in order to attract and retain customers. Marketing research does so by collection of accurate and correct information with regards to customers and then develops the appropriate marketing mix that is effective for the selected target market. Marketing research include collection of valuable information such as 4 Ps which results in development of effective marketing ...