Understanding Marketing: Needs, Wants, and Demands

Marketing: Fulfilling Human Needs and Wants

• Marketing's core is addressing human needs, wants, and demands.
• Human needs are fundamental, wants are desired but non-essential, and demands are wants with the ability to pay.
• The market offers products (goods, services, etc.) to satisfy these.
• Manufacturing and service organizations develop and provide these products.
• The process involves identifying needs, creating a product, and delivering it, leading to satisfaction.

Defining Marketing: Key Perspectives

• A concise definition is identifying and profitably satisfying human needs and wants.
• Marketing involves identifying needs/wants, developing a product, communicating value, delivering to the customer for satisfaction.
• Profitability comes from repeat purchases and loyalty.
• Philip Kotler defines marketing as identifying and satisfying human needs and wants profitably.
• The American Marketing Association defines marketing as an organizational function creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and benefiting the organization and its stakeholders.
• This definition emphasizes value creation, communication, and delivery.
• From a societal perspective (Philip Kotler), marketing is how individuals/groups obtain needs/wants by creating, offering, and exchanging valuable products/services.
• This highlights the exchange of value within society.

Marketing Management: Art and Science

• Marketing management selects target markets and grows customer base with superior customer value.
• Customer value attracts and retains customers.
• Marketing is dynamic, constantly changing with customer preferences.
• Creativity is needed in product design and delivery.
• A market is customer-oriented, competitive, value-driven, and integrated.
• It is a managerial, organizational, social, and global process.

Functions of Marketing

• Marketing research determines customer needs and wants.
• Functions include product planning, development, buying, and selling.
• Also includes packaging, standardization, grading, branding, pricing, promotion, distribution, selling, storage, warehousing, and transportation.

Importance and Objectives of Marketing

• Main objectives are customer satisfaction, increasing demand, and providing better quality products.
• Also, creating goodwill and generating profitable sales volumes.
• The main objectives are profit-making and customer satisfaction.

What Can Be Marketed?

• Goods (TVs, food)
• Services (hotels, airlines)
• Events (Olympics, concerts)
• Experiences (theme parks)
• Persons (celebrities, professionals)
• Places (tourist destinations)
• Properties (real estate)
• Organizations (museums, charities)
• Information (books)
• Ideas (concepts promoted by advertising agencies).

The Marketer: Initiating the Exchange

• A marketer advertises or promotes something for sale.

Key Terms: Market Place, Space, and Meta-Market

• Marketplace is a physical location for purchases.
• Marketspace is a digital environment for buying and selling (e.g., Amazon, Flipkart).
• Metamarket is a cluster of complementary products/services across industries (e.g., automotive with financing, insurance, spare parts).

Core Concepts of Marketing: The Essentials

• Identifying and satisfying human needs and wants profitably highlights marketing's essential components.
• Fundamental elements revolve around needs, wants, and demands:
  • Needs: Basic human requirements
  • Wants: Desires for specific satisfiers of needs
  • Demands: Wants backed by purchasing power
• Satisfaction is met by making a "product" that satisfies needs/wants.
• Exchanges are done with costumers in a give-and-take dynamic.
• Products are exchanged with customers, involving giving one thing and receiving something else of value.
• Value refers to perceived benefits relative to cost; both the marketer and customer give and receive value.
• Satisfaction depends on perceived value vs. cost.
• If value surpasses cost, the customer is satisfied; otherwise, dissatisfaction occurs.
• Core concepts of marketing intertwine: need, want, demand, marketer, product, exchange, value, satisfaction.