Defining Marketing Paper

Marketing Paper

Marketing an important part of the business organization, it is more than promoting and selling a product. Marketing is satisfying the changing needs of the customer. The very successful businessman Bill Gates can best sum this up when he said, "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning ". The purpose of this paper is to define marketing from at least two different sources, based on these definitions explain the importance of marketing in organizational success. Also, provide at least three examples from the business world of the importance of marketing to the organizational success.

According too the American Marketing Association marketing is defined as: 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 stakeholders.

Marketing is more than selling and promotion, the primary concern, or objective of marketing is to identify and satisfy, or exceed the changing needs of customers. In view of this broad concern of marketing, it can be seen that the concept of marketing summarizes many activities in a business. Marketing, in fact, refers to any activity undertaken by a firm that has been designed to plan, price, promote and distribute ideas, goods and services to target markets. These marketing activities were executed in order to create an exchange and sales that will result in the achievement of the proprietors' individual goals and the firm's goals, both in the short-term and the long-term. It is then obvious that marketing forms an integral component of organizational strategies.

The Webster's definition of marketing is " (1) The act or process of buying and selling in a market. (2) The commercial functions involved in transferring goods from producer to consumer." The comprehension of the functionality and need for marketing is a good starting point in understanding what's the purpose and how it interrelates in an economy and enhances consumer awareness. If one has a good understanding of future trends, then a person should be able to have better knowledge (than the competitor) about customer wants and needs, one can develop a new and better way to approach the market.

As one can see, the modern day definitions of marketing encompass more than promoting and selling a product. They could be compared with the four P's (product, place, promotion and price), which are normally used to describe the process of marketing. However, the concepts of marketing, production, product, selling, and society marketing give another view into the difficult and never ending process of marketing.

Modern marketing includes increased social responsibility and environmental awareness, which may include tackling the problems of pollution and the exposure of non-renewable resources. Modern day businesses are under pressure to adopt this marketing approach, in order to become more socially responsible. This approach not only focuses on fulfilling the customer's want-satisfaction, but also satisfying society.

An example of the integration of information technology into the market place is that more and more, new technology appears to be focusing on the addition of value. On an individual level, for example, the marketer may use the technology to make himself more accessible to the consumer thus adding to his service levels. A company may realize added value by investing in expensive multimedia kiosks, which introduce the subject of interactive marketing.

Another example is the emergence of the highly competitive health care market. Market-level comparisons have found the cost growth of health care in markets with greater managed care penetration to be generally slower than that of non-managed care health insurance markets. However, managed care is unlikely to prevent the share of gross domestic product spent on health care from rising unless the cost-increasing nature of new medical technologies changes.