Step 6: Marketing

Know Your Customers

The marketing function and related activities in an enterprise, small or large, ensure that an enterprise gets information from its customers, develops and markets the services to satisfy their needs and gets feedback on their satisfaction levels. Marketing is as interface between the enterprise and its markets.

But it does not operate on its own; it interacts with other functions, for example, marketing, finance, accounting and production determine price levels; marketing and human resources develop customer service policies, or marketing and public relations create and support the image of an enterprise.

Summary Definition:
We can summarize marketing as the function that encompasses most activities between the producer of a good or the supplier of a service and the consumers. It is a also set of business development activities which starts with the consumer from whose needs the business gets its service ideas and to whom it will sell its services. We can define it as: 

"Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives".

(The definition of marketing approved by the board of directors of the American Marketing Association on March 1, 1985)

Marketing Mix
The marketing mix traditionally includes four basic elements (the 4 'P's): product/service, price, place/distribution and promotion. In a service context, we can add three other elements (the 3 ‘P’s) which appear important to the consumer and that businesses have to define strategically: the process/delivery (how the service is rendered), the physical evidence (the environment) and the people (performing the services).

The Markets
Markets of all types are evolving in mostly unpredictable ways; the competition is getting more intense; it is increasingly more challenging to obtain a clear picture of market profiles and segments to be targeted; new trends constantly emerge, such as customization, one- on-one and relationship marketing and it has become more complex to define the potential of service offerings and to estimate the demand for these.

The module
This module on strategic marketing offers YOU a diagnostic of your marketing activities and some recommendations as to where your enterprise should be heading In terms of its marketing strategy. The goal is to focus activities in the most effective manner in pursuit of your company’s mission. There is a voluntary bias toward small and medium size businesses where resources (financial, human, technical and material) might be limited.