What Is Marketing

What is Marketing?

According to (Kotler, 2003) “Marketing is the business function that identifies unfulfilled needs and wants, defines and measures their magnitude and potential profitability, determines which target markets the organisation can best serve, decides on appropriate products, services, and programs to serve these chosen markets, and calls upon everyone in the organisation to think and serve the customer.” The goals are to create value by offering superior solutions, save the buyer time and effort in finding and purchasing goods/services, and delivering a higher standard of living to society as a whole.

Evolution of Marketing

(Keith, 1960)

During a production orientation era, business concerned itself primarily with production, manufacturing, and efficiency issues. The reason for the predominance of this orientation is that there was a shortage of manufactured goods (relative to demand) during this period, so goods sold easily. The implications of this orientation were:

· Product lines were narrow

· Pricing was based on the costs of production and distribution

· Research was limited to technical product research

· Packaging was designed primarily to protect the product

· Promotion and advertising was minimal

After the WWII, as supply was starting to out-pace demand in many industries businesses had to concentrate on ways of selling their products. Numerous sales techniques such as closing, probing, and qualifing were all developed during sales orientation era and the sales department started to play a ky role in a company's organizational structure. Other promotional techniques like advertising and sales promotions were starting to be taken seriously. Packaging and labeling were used for promotional purposes more than protective purposes and pricing was usually based on comparisons with competitors.

The development of marketing orientation was motivated by the need to dissect in greater detail relationships and behaviours that existed between sellers and buyers. In the old days of marketing (before the 1950s) companies were identifying strategies and tactics for simply selling more products and services with little regard for what customers really wanted. Often this led companies to embrace a “sell-as-much-as-we-can” philosophy with little concern for building relationships for the long term. But starting in the 1950s, as competition grew stiffer across most industries, firms started looking for ways to improve. In 1960, Theodore Levitt, introduced the notion of “Marketing Myopia”, which forms the basis of the present day marketing concept. Levitt argued that companies were thinking too much of their product not potential customers. This marketing concept suggests, that marketing decisions should be made by first knowing the customer and what they want. Only then should an organization initiate the process of developing and marketing products and services.

Customer Orientation and Value Creation

Today’s marketing is customer oriented, focused on satisfying customer needs. (Armstrong and Kotler, 2002) define marketing as a “social and managerial process whereby individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others”. We have to distinguish between human needs, wants and demands. Human needs represent states of felt deprivation. Grouped as physical (i.e. food, clothing), social (i.e. belonging, affection) and individual (i.e. knowledge, self-expression) they form basic