What is Marketing?

 

What is marketing??

Marketers define marketing as an "overall activity which starts right from the manufacturing of good and continues even after the good is sold to the customer". 

Marketing is a profound and exciting concept that drives the market and the companies; this can build or crash a company's growth. Marketing is an overall organizational activity that includes several steps or processes like:

Planning

Pricing

Promotion

Packaging

Advertising

Selling.

Are marketing and Sales the same thing??

No, Sales and marketing are entirely different concepts; marketing is an umbrella, and sales coming under that umbrella. Marketing is a broad and deep concept, whereas sales is just the exchange of goods and services. So sales are just a part of marketing which generates revenue.

Marketing can be considered a backbone of a firm that helps in the primary functioning, while sales can be similar to a body part, which is also an essential part; if marketing is done perfectly, it would ultimately help boost sales generation of revenues. 

People often get confused between sales and marketing, but a company has two different departments for sales and marketing, respectively. In laymen's language, the marketing team's work is to analyze the market, collect a customer database, and further provide them to the sales department, which contacts the prospects to convert them into customers. 

 

The 4 P's of marketing 

Marketing is an old concept, and different marketers have coined other pictures to make it easy and practical. In 1960 a marketer named E Jerome McCarthy coined the idea of 4 Ps of marketing namely: 

(a) Product

(b) Price

(c) Place 

(d) Promotion

These 4 Ps elaborates on the basic steps of how marketing impacts any business. To understand these stages, lets go through these stages one by one: 

Product

To understand this better let's take a situation where a company named XYZ wants to launch a new product in the market, but will that product start to get sold and generate revenue without performing any other activity? The answer is no, and there are many activities that a company needs to do before getting itself into the market.

The company would need a marketing team to do market research and understand what exactly people are looking for and what product can solve their problem. The team would first identify the targeted audience and gather some critical questions that may arise related to the product.

Marketers than finds solution to the aroused questions and these answers help them to increase the quality of the product and serve the customers, only then it can be successful.

Price 

Price is one of the critical factors that control the sales of any product, the price of a product is inversely proportional to the sales of the product. If the price of the product is injudiciously increased without any modification in the product then that might result in a gradual decrease in sales.

Price should neither be too high that the company loses a solid customer base nor it should be too less that the company goes into loss. Price should be justified in reference to the product. Marketers should research the industry and pitch an appropriate price.

Place

The next step is to decide the place where the product is supposed to be sold. It is important to choose the proper place to pitch your product. Ecommerce platforms these days have emerged as a strong marketplace where a company can target their desired audience. 

For instance, if a video game company wants to launch a new game station and use the traditional method of distribution rather than using an e-commerce platform so the company might not get the expected response so it is very crucial to choose the right marketplace. 

Promotion

This is the final stage of the 4 P that is promotion, in this stage, the company communicates with the audience to give insights into the product. The communication channel used could be anyone like:

Public relation campaigns 

Social media promotions

Advertisement 

The primary objective of promotion is to reach the customer's eyeballs and make customers aware of their product.

Hopefully, the definition of the 4 Ps helped you to understand the basics of marketing and the purpose of marketing in any organization. Marketing goes hand in hand with all kind of business