Defining Marketing for the 21st Century

Chapter 1: Defining Marketing for the 21st Century

1. The Importance of Marketing

• Extends to a society as a whole.
• Has helped introduce and gain acceptance of new products that have eased or enriched people’s lives.
• Can inspire enhancements in existing products as marketers innovate or improve their position in the marketplace.
• Successful marketing builds demand for products and services, which creates jobs.
• Allows firms to more fully engage in socially responsible activities.
• Builds strong brands and loyal customer base.

Case Study: Domino’s 2 employees in Conover, NC posted a YouTube video of them preparing sandwiches while putting cheese up their noses and violating health code standards.  Domino’s learned a valuable lesson about PR and brand communications via social media.  

• For negative publicity, important to respond swiftly and decisively.
• Marketers need to understand and adapt to the latest marketplace developments.
• Must carefully monitor their customers and their competitors, continuously improve their value offerings and marketing strategies as well as satisfy their employees, stockholders, suppliers and channel partners.
• Good marketers are always seeking new ways to satisfy customers and beat competition.

1. The Scope of Marketing

1. What Is Marketing?

Marketing: about identifying and meeting human and social needs; “meeting needs profitably;” good examples are eBay and IKEA by demonstrating marketing savvy with turning a private or social need into a profitable business opportunity;  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.

Marketing management: takes place when at least one party to a potential exchange thinks about the means of achieving desired responses from other parties; the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping and growing customers through creating, delivering and communicating superior customer value.

Social definition of marketing: the role of marketing in society is to “deliver a higher standard of living” such that marketing is a societal process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering and freely exchanging products and services of value with others.

Managerial definition of marketing: the role of marketing as viewed by managers is that it is the “the art of selling products.”  But as Peter Drucker says,

“There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling.  But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.  The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.  Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy.  All that should be needed then is to make the product or service available.”

1. What is Marketed?

1. Goods: physical goods, such as, fresh canned, bagged and frozen food as well as cars, refrigerators, TVs and machines
2. Services: US economy is a 70-30 goods-services mix; services include airlines, hotels, car rentals, barbers, lawyers, bankers, etc.
3. Events: major trade shows, artistic performances and sporting events
4. Experiences: Walt Disney World, baseball camp, etc.
5. Persons: Artists, musicians, CEOs all need branding such as David Beckham, Oprah Winfrey, The Rolling Stones
6. Places: cities, states & regions; such as Las Vegas
7. Properties
8. Organizations
9. Information
10. Ideas: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” and “A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste.”

1. Who Markets?

1. Marketers and Prospects

Marketer: someone who seeks a response—attention, a purchase, a vote, a donation—from another party called the prospect.  If two parties are seeking to sell something to each other, we call them both the marketers.  Skilled at stimulating demand for their products and are responsible for demand management.  They seek to influence the level, timing and composition of demand to meet the organization’s objectives.

1. Negative Demand—consumers dislike the product and may even pay to avoid it
2. Nonexistent Demand—consumers may be unaware of or uninterested in the product
3. Latent Demand—consumers may share a strong need that cannot be satisfied by an existing product
4. Declining Demand—consumers begin to buy the product less frequently or not at all
5. Irregular Demand—consumer purchases vary on a seasonal, monthly, weekly, daily or even hourly basis
6. Full Demand—consumers are adequately buying all products put into the marketplace
7. Overfull Demand—more consumers would like to buy the product that can be satisfied
8. Unwholesome Demand—consumers may be attracted to products that have undesirable social consequences

1. Markets

Market: traditionally, a physical place where buyers and sellers gathered to buy and sell goods.  Economists describe a market as a collection of buyers and sellers who transact over a particular product or product class (housing or grain).  Marketers use the term market to cover various groupings of customers.  They view sellers as constituting the industry and buyers as constituting the marker.  They talk about need markets (diet-seeking market); product markets (shoe market); demographic markets (youth market); and the geographic markets (Chinese market) as well as the voter, donor and labor markets.

Five basic markets:

1. Manufacturer markets: they go to resource markets (raw material markets, labor markets, money markets), buy resources and turn them into goods and services and sell finished products to intermediaries, who sell them to consumers.
2. Resource markets (raw material markets, labor markets, money markets)
3. Consumer markets: sell their labor and receive money with which they pay for goods and services.
4. Government markets: collects tax revenues to buy goods from resource, manufacturer and intermediary markets and uses these goods and services to provide public services.
5. Intermediary markets

Four Industry-Market Flows:

1. Communication: sellers send ads and direct mail to the market
2. Information: the market sends customer attitudes back as an exchange of information from the ads received
3. Goods/Services: sellers send their services out to market and receive payment in return
4. Money: once buyers receive goods or services rendered, then payment will be issued and sales data can be collected

1. Key Customer Markets

Consumer Markets: companies selling mass consumer goods and services such as juices, cosmetics, athletic shoes and air travel spend a great deal of time establishing a strong brand image by developing a superior product and packaging, ensuring its availability and backing it with engaging communications and reliable service

Business Markets: companies selling business goods and services often face well-informed professional buyers skilled at evaluating competitive offerings.  Business buyers buy goods to make or resell a product to others at a profit.  Business marketers must demonstrate how their products will help achieve higher revenue or lower costs.  Advertising can play a role, but the sales force, the price and the company’s reputation may play a greater role.