Marketing

This paper will introduce, discuss, and define marketing in business. It will discuss Market analysis, inbound and outbound marketing and the four p’s. Marketing has many definitions and facets of operation. After reading this paper one will discover that marketing is much more than just advertising something in a newspaper or on television.

Marketing is art and science of creating value; the flow of goods or services to the target market while building business relationships and interacting with different people in order to capture value from customers in return (Kotler and Armstrong, 2005). The American Marketing Association or (AMA) first defined marketing in 1937. The AMA stated that marketing consists of those activities involved in the flow of goods and services from the point of production to the point of consumption, then later amended its definition to read: 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 the stakeholders.

The first process in marketing a product or service is making a market analysis. The information needed includes finding out what groups of potential customers exist, what the target markets are and what their needs are, and what products or services they will require. This information will help the company determine the pricing and distribution to these target markets. The next step is promotions, such as, advertising, public relations, sales, and customer service.

Strategic or Inbound marketing can be summed into what is known as the four p’s, product, place, promotion, and price. The word product qualifies a marketing concept. A product is more than a person, place or thing. Nothing is more important to a marketing strategy than the product concept. Finding the right product concept is one of the four critical objectives of marketing. The following example illustrates why the successful strategic marketer will carefully and completely consider his product options. Swiss watch companies made 'Swiss watch actions' and enjoyed a dominate position in the world market. By the 1970's they had introduced many inventive variations of the 'Swiss watch action'. However, they completely ignored the streams of independent invention that, together, created the quartz watch action. During the early 1900's, aerospace scientists invented new materials like liquid crystals, and laid the basis for miniaturized electronic circuitry, calculators, and watches. The number of employees making Swiss watch actions fell from 90,000 in 1970 to 30,000 in 1980 (the number of companies decreased from 1,600 to only 600). The effect is significant today only 35,000 employees manufacture Swiss watch actions.

Place can mean geographic or demographic or where one can take their product to the market. It can be broken down even further in what