From a managerial point of view, 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 its stake holders. Marketing management is the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value. Marketers are skilled at managing demand: They seek to influence the level, timing, and composition of demand.Marketers are involved in marketing many types of entities: goods, services, events, experiences, persons, places, properties, organizations, information, and ideas.
They also operate in four different marketplaces: consumer, business, global, and nonprofit. Marketing is not done only by the marketing department. Marketing needs to affect every aspect of the customer experience. To create a strong marketing organization, marketers must think like executives in other departments, and executives in other departments must think more like marketers.Today’s marketplace is fundamentally different as a result of major societal forces that have resulted in many new consumer and company capabilities. These forces have created new opportunities and challenges and marketing management has changed significantly in recent years as companies seek new ways to achieve marketing excellence.
There are five competing concepts under which organizations can choose to conduct their business: the production concept, the product concept, the selling concept, the marketing concept, and the holistic marketing concept.The first three are of limited use today. The holistic marketing concept is based on the development, design, and implementation of marketing programs, processes, and activities that recognize their breadth and interdependencies. Holistic marketing recognizes that “everything matters” with marketing and that a broad, integrated perspective is often necessary.
Four components of holistic marketing are relationship marketing, integrated marketing, internal marketing, and socially responsible marketing.The set of tasks necessary for successful marketing management includes developing marketing strategies and plans, capturing marketing insights, connecting with customers, building strong brands, shaping the market offerings, delivering and communicating value, and creating long-term growth. OPENING THOUGHT Marketing is too often confused and identified with advertising or selling techniques, and our practices and theories are all too often invisible to the average consumer.The instructor should spend some class time differentiating between advertising/promotion techniques and marketing. Students who are not marketing majors will have some difficulty accepting the encompassing role that marketing has on the other functional disciplines within a firm.
For those students who have never been exposed to marketing and its components, the instructor’s challenge is to educate the students about the world of marketing.The in-class and outside of class assignments noted in this text should help both educate and excite the students about the “world of marketing. ” Semester-Long Marketing Plan Project An effective way to help students learn about marketing management is through the actual creation of a marketing plan for a product or service. This project is designed to accomplish such a task. Dividing the class into groups, have each group decide on a “fictional” consumer product or service they wish to bring to market.
During the course of the semester, each of the elements of the marketing plan, coordinating with the text chapter, will be due for the instructor’s review. The instructor is encouraged to review each submission and suggest areas for improvement, for more detailed study, or if acceptable to allow the students to proceed to the next phase in development. Students can use the computer program Marketing Plan Pro in creating their proposals and submissions and in their final presentation(s). At the end of the semester, each group is to present their entire marketing plan to the class.
In small groups, ask the students to visit an on-campus eatery or coffee shop as noted in the opening vignette in the chapter. During this experience, have the students keep a diary of their exposures to marketing messages. How are the messages being communicated—visually through signs and posters, by sound, or via verbal communication? Ask the students to break down these messages into 1-minute segments, and then total the amount of messages for the time spent in the eatery. What conclusions can you draw from the number of messages exposed to in the time period for marketers?Assign students the task of visiting some companies websites to see if they feel that the company is responding to the changes in marketing today, namely, customer-orientated marketing. Suggestions include firms like: Rollerblade, and Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream.
Have the students comment on what they find there of particular interest to them.Students can choose a firm of their preference, interview key marketing management members and ask the firm how they are reacting to the changes in marketing management for the 21st century (students should ask and have answers to all of the 14 points listed in the chapter in Table 1.1).Have the students read Suzanne Vranica’s “Marketers Aim New Ads at Video iPod Users,” Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2006 and Li Yuan and Brian Steinberg’s “Sales Call: More Ads Hit Cellphone Screens,” Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2006, p.
B3 and comment on how effective they believe cell phone advertisements will be in the future.Have the students reflect upon their favorite product and/or service. Then have the students collect marketing examples from each of these companies. This information should be in the form of examples of printed advertising, copies of television commercials, Internet advertising, or radio commercials. During class, have the students share what they have collected with others.
Questions to ask during the class discussion should focus on why this particular example of advertising elicits a response from you. What do you like/dislike about this marketing message? Does everyone in the class like/dislike this advertising? Marketing has often been defined in terms of satisfying customers’ needs and wants. Critics, however, maintain that marketing does much more than that, marketing creates needs and wants that did not exist before. According to these critics, marketers encourage consumers to spend more money than they should on goods and services they really do not need.
Take a position: Marketing shapes consumer needs and wants versus marketing merely reflects the needs and wants of consumers.Suggested Response Pro: With the vast amount of information available to marketers today and the emphasis on relational marketing, marketers are in more of a position to suggest needs and wants to the public. Certainly, not all consumers have all the needs and wants suggested by society today. However, with the vast amount of exposure to these societal needs and wants via the media, a substantial amount of consumers will, through mere exposure, decide that they “have” the same needs and wants of others. Marketers by their efforts increase peer pressure, and group thinking, by showing examples of what others may have that they do not.
An individual’s freedom to choose is substantially weakened by constant and consistent exposure to a range of needs and wants of others. Marketers should understand that when it comes to resisting the pressure to conform, that individuals are and can be weak in their resolve. Marketers must take an ethical position to only market to those consumers able to purchase their products.Con: Marketing merely reflects societal needs and wants. The perception that marketers influence consumers’ purchasing decisions discounts an individual’s freedom of choice and their individual responsibility.
With the advent of the Internet, consumers have greater freedom of choice and more evaluative criteria than every before. Consumers can and do make more informed decisions than previous generations. Marketers can be rightly accused of influencing wants, along with societal factors such as power, influence, peer pressure, and social status. These societal factors pre-exist marketing and would continue to exist if there was no marketing efforts expended.Consider the broad shifts in marketing. Are there any themes that emerge to these shifts? Can they be related to the major societal forces? Which force contributed to which shift?Suggested Response The major themes that emerge in these broad shifts are technology, decentralization, and empowerment.
As companies face increased global competition, they are beginning to increase their attention to all aspects of marketing and are beginning to encompass marketing as a corporate goal and not just a departmental function.The major societal forces at work: two-income families, increased technology, fewer firms, increased consumer education, and empowerment are forcing companies and marketers to shift their thinking about marketing and rethink their best business practices.
