The Scope of Marketing
What is Marketing?
Marketing is about identifying and meeting human and social needs. One of the shortest good definitions of marketing is “meeting needs profitably”. When Google recognized that people needed to more effectively and efficiently access information on the internet, it created a powerful search engine that organized and prioritized queries. When Nintendo designed its Wii game system when Apple launched its IPad tablet computer, and when Toyota introduced its Prius hybrid automobile, these manufacturers were swamped with orders because they had designed the right product, based on careful marketing homework about customers, competition, and all the external factors that affect cost and demand.
What is Marketed?
Marketers market mainly 10 types of entities: goods, services, events, experiences, persons, places, properties, organizations, information, and ideas.
GOODS- Physical goods constitute the bulk of most countries’ production and marketing efforts. Each year, U.S. companies market billions of fresh, canned, bagged, and frozen food products and millions of cars, refrigerators, televisions, machines, etc.
EVENTS- Marketers promote time-based events, such as major trade shows, artistic performances, and company anniversaries. Global sporting events such as the Olympics and the World Cup are promoted aggressively to companies and fans.
Information- Information is essentially what books, schools, and universities produce, market, and distribute at a price to parents, students, and communities.
Who Markets?
A marketer is someone who seeks a response- attention, a purchase, a vote, a donation — from another party, called the prospect. If two parties are seeking to sell something to each other, we call them both marketers.
Marketers are skilled at stimulating demand for their products, but that’s a limited view of what they do. They also seek to influence the level, timing, and composition of demand to meet the organization’s objectives. Eight demand states are possible:
- Negative demand- Consumers dislike the product and may even pay to avoid it.
- Non-Existent demand — Consumers may be unaware of or uninterested in the product.
- Latent demand — Consumers may share a strong need that cannot be satisfied by an existing product.
- Declining demand — Consumers begin to buy the product less frequently or not at all.
- Irregular demand — Consumer purchases vary on a seasonal, monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly basis.
- Full demand — Consumers are adequately buying all products put into the marketplace.
- Overfull demand — More consumers would like to buy the product than can be satisfied.
- Unwholesome demand — Consumers may be attracted to products that have undesirable social consequences.
In each case, marketers must identify the underlying cause(s) of the demand state and determine a plan of action to shift demand to a more desired state.
