Marketing Mix

Marketing

Marketing to organizations can be a catapult to success or can be a detriment to success. People's perceptions of marketing can very depending upon who you talk to. Engineers might think that there is no need for marketing because the product will sell without fancy packaging and advertising. Operations may feel that marketing is just another expense that the organization must bear to keep product flowing through the factory. People may only understand marketing as putting a product or service into a neat little package and selling the product to a consumer. According to the American Marketing Association "Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customers relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders" (Anonymous, 2004). Over the years I have worked very closely with the marketing department at my previous employer and these conceived perceptions are not what marketing is about. Peter Drucker says it best "Marketing and innovation are the two chief functions of business. You get paid for creating a customer, which is marketing. And you get paid for creating a new dimension of performance, which is innovation. Everything else is a cost center" (Cohn, Unknown). I view marketing as the means by which a company determines what product or service the company is going to sell; How much are they going to sell the product for; Who is the company going to sell the product to; How do they get the message out to who is going to buy the product.

Marketing strategy consists of segmentation, targeting, positioning and is supported by the marketing mix or the "price, product, promotion, and place" (Kotler, Keller, 2006, p. 19). All three portions of the marketing strategy rely heavily on marketing research to establish an effective business plan. Research into the demographics of the market help break the industry into pieces or segment the industry. Marketing research helps determine what segment of the market is more attractive and should be targeted from a growth and profitability standpoint. Understanding the particular customers through research also helps an organization position itself to appeal to the targeted consumers.

Companies can make a product or provide a service but without understanding what product or service the consumer desires is a big piece of the puzzle. Marketing research takes an enormous amount of time and effort. Companies have to determine what segments in which they should conduct research and specify what problems they want to solve in those markets. Since company resources are limited, each organization needs to prioritize the targeted segments in which they conduct research. Additionally, organizations need to manage the timing of their resource allocation to maintain efficiency. While it may be tempting to conduct marketing research to strengthen competitive advantages in all of the segments of the business, it may be impractical to operate in such a manner due to the limits of the organizations resources.

The company I previously worked for designed a product for the agricultural spraying market. The system was designed to inject insecticides or herbicides into the water stream and provide a consistent amount of chemical no matter what the flow or pressure. There was no market research done prior to the development of this product. The sales department tried to sell the product to original equipment manufactures but they didn't know how to apply the technology. One day someone within the company said this product would work great in the firefighting world for applying foam concentrate