Overview of Marketing Concepts

Overview of Marketing

• Marketing is about managing profitable customer relationships.
• The goal of marketing is to attract new customers by promising superior value and keep and grow current customer base by delivering satisfaction.
• The old view of marketing was about making a sale ("telling and selling"), but the new view is about satisfying customer needs.
• Marketing is defined as the process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships to capture value from those customers in return.
• The marketing process involves five steps:
  • Understanding the marketplace and customer needs and wants.
  • Designing a customer-driven marketing strategy.
  • Constructing an integrated marketing program that delivers superior value.
  • Building profitable relationships and creating customer delight.
  • Capturing value from customers to create profits and customer equity.

Core Marketplace Concepts

• Marketers must understand five core customer and marketplace concepts: needs, wants, and demands; market offerings such as products, services, and experiences; value and satisfaction; exchange and relationships; and markets.
• Needs are states of felt deprivation, they can be physical, social, and individual.
• Wants are shaped by culture and individual personality, they are the form that a need takes.
• Demands are human wants backed by buying power.
• Market offerings are combinations of products, services, information, or experiences offered to a market to satisfy a need or want.
• Marketing Myopia occurs when sellers focus on the specific products they offer rather than the benefits and experiences produced by those products.
• Customer value is the customer's evaluation of the difference between all of the benefits and all of the costs of a marketing offer relative to those of competing offers.
• Customer Satisfaction is dependent on the product’s perceived performance matching a buyer’s expectations.
  • Higher levels of customer satisfaction lead to consumer loyalty.
• Exchange is the act of obtaining a desired object from someone by offering something in return.
• A market is the set of actual and potential buyers of a product or service.

Modern Marketing Systems

• Major elements in a modern marketing system include: suppliers, the company (marketer), competitors, marketing intermediaries, and consumers.
• Major environmental forces affect each element: demographic, economic, natural, technological, political, cultural, and social

Designing a Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy

• Marketing management is the art and science of choosing target markets and building profitable relationships with them.
• It is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals.
• It aims to find, attract, keep, and grow customers by creating, delivering, and communicating superior value.
• Key questions to consider while designing a winning marketing strategy are:
  • What customers will we serve? (What is our target market?)
  • How can we best serve these customers? (What is our value proposition?)
• Market segmentation is dividing the market into segments of customers.
• Target marketing is selecting one or more segments to cultivate.
• A value proposition is the set of benefits or values a company promises to deliver to consumers to satisfy their needs.

Marketing Management Orientations

• Organizations can design and carry out marketing strategies under five alternative concepts:
  • Production Concept – Focuses on improving production and distribution efficiency.
  • Product Concept – Focuses on the quality, performance, or innovative features of the product.
  • Selling Concept – Focuses on creating sales transactions rather than building long-term, profitable customer relationships.
  • Marketing/Customer Concept – Focuses on knowing the needs and wants of target markets and delivering the desired satisfaction better than competitors.
  • Societal Marketing Concept – Emphasizes consideration for consumers’ wants, the company’s desires, consumers’ long-run interests, and society’s long-run interests.

Preparing an Integrated Marketing Plan and Program

• The marketing program builds customer relationships by transforming the marketing strategy into action.
• The program consists of the firm’s marketing mix (4Ps): product, price, place, and promotion.
• To deliver on its value proposition, the firm must create a need-satisfying market offering (product), decide on a price, make the offering available to target consumers (place), and communicate with target customers about the offering and persuade them of its merits (promotion).
• The firm must blend each marketing mix tool into a comprehensive integrated marketing program.

Building Customer Relationships

• Customer relationship management (CRM) is the overall process of building and maintaining profitable customer relationships by delivering superior customer value and satisfaction.
• CRM deals with all aspects of acquiring, keeping, and growing customers.

Capturing Value From Customers

• Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the value of the entire stream of purchases that the customer would make over a lifetime of patronage.
• Businesses should seek to maximize customer lifetime value.
• CLV helps companies make decisions on how to allocate resources, manage customer relationships, and measure marketing ROI.

This quiz explores the fundamental concepts of marketing, focusing on how businesses manage customer relationships and create value. Learn about the marketing process and its key steps in building customer satisfaction and loyalty. Suitable for anyone looking to understand the modern approach to marketing.