Today’s companies share the same drive to meet the needs of customers in well-defined target markets. They motivate their employees to build long-term and sustainable customer relationships to create value.
Customer relationships and value are especially important these days. Due to significant technological changes and profound economic, social and environmental challenges, today’s customers are rethinking how they interact with brands. New digital, mobile, and social media trends are revolutionizing how consumers shop and communicate, calling for new marketing strategies and tactics. Today, building strong customer relationships and relationships with real and sustainable customer value-driven campaigns has never been more important.
What is marketing?
Marketing has more contact with customers than any other function of a business. Perhaps the simplest definition is this: marketing is building relationships with customers and managing profitable customer relationships. Marketing has two goals. The first is to attract new customers by promising superior value, and the second is to retain and grow existing customers by providing value and satisfaction.
For example, Nike outshines all of its competitors by delivering on its promise to inspire athletes and support them on a daily basis to “Just Do It.” Amazon dominates the online marketplace by creating a world-class shopping experience that helps customers “find and discover anything they want to buy online.” Facebook has attracted more than 1.5 billion active web and mobile users worldwide because of its ability to “connect and share with the people in our lives.” Also, Coca-Cola has a large share of the global carbonated beverage market – 49 per cent market share, which is twice the share of Pepsi, fulfilling the slogan “Taste the Feeling” through products that provide “simple pleasures that make everyday moments special.” there are many.
Sound and robust marketing is critical to the success of any organization. Large for-profit companies such as Google, Target, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft use marketing. But nonprofit organizations like colleges, hospitals, museums, symphony orchestras, and even churches benefit from marketing and its tools.
You already know a lot about marketing because marketing involves everything that surrounds you. Marketing comes to you in well-traditional forms: you can see it at the mall near you, in the ads that fill your TV screen, in magazines, or in your mailbox. But in recent years, marketers have been able to create many new marketing approaches, from creative websites and smartphone apps to blog pages, online videos and social media. These new approaches can do more than simply appeal to the masses. They connect with you directly, personally and interactively. Today’s marketers want to be a part of your life and enrich your experience with their brand. They want to help you keep their brand alive.
At home, at school, where you work, where you play, you can see marketing in everything you do. However, marketing involves more than what meets the casual eye of the consumer. Behind all of this is a vast network of people, technology and activity competing for your attention and payments. This book will provide you with a comprehensive introduction to the basic concepts and applications of marketing. We begin this chapter by explaining the concept of marketing and the marketing process.
Defining marketing
What is marketing? Many people think that marketing is sales and advertising. We are bombarded with information on a daily basis from television commercials, magazines, vendor advertisements, and online tours. However, sales and advertising are only the tip of the marketing iceberg.
Today, marketing should be understood not only in the traditional sales sense, as “talking and selling”, but in a new sense, that is, in the sense of satisfying customer needs. If marketers can effectively communicate with consumers, understand their needs, offer products that can create high consumer value at an affordable price, and present and distribute them well, then these products will sell easily. Indeed, according to management guru Peter Drucker, “the goal of marketing is to make sales irrelevant.” Sales and advertising are only part of the marketing mix. A marketing mix is a set of marketing tools used together to interact with customers, meet their needs, and build customer relationships.
Broadly speaking, marketing is a social and managerial process in which individuals and organizations satisfy their needs and wants and the value created is mutually exchanged. In the narrower business sense, marketing involves building a profitable and value-based relationship with customers. Thus, we can define the concept of marketing as the process of creating customer value in order to build mutual relationships with customers, build strong customer relationships and gain value in return.
Marketing process
It describes a simple, five-step model of the marketing process that captures the creation and capture of customer value. In the first four steps, companies try to understand customers, create customer value, and build strong customer relationships. In the last step, companies reap the benefits of superior customer value creation. By creating value for consumers, they ultimately gain value from consumers in the form of sales, profits, and long-term customer equity.
