My first day in a marketing class the lecturer asked me what the relationship between the product and the market place. Those days I was newbie in marketing and all I knew about marketing was the word sales. Therefore I had no clue what marketing was. To me marketing was sales.
The lecturer went to tell me that the role of marketing in an organization is to chart the way forward on:
- What products to produce.
- Whom to distribute the products to.
- What channels to use and
- How to communicate about the product.
The lecturer concluded that the above is what marketers refer to as the marketing mix and is the core of any marketing activity.
For the first time in my life a person talked about marketing without mentioning the word sales, promotion, advertisement etc.
The role of marketing in your business is to enable your business attract and keep customers. These customers must be willing and are able to pay for your products. Your fist role as a marketer is to locate your and identify your customers in terms of where they live, work, pray and play.
After locating them, you need to understand and know their needs, wants, desing values, lifestyle, and demographics, once it’s accomplished; you need to create products that will satisfy their needs and wants.
After all this is done you will need to take your products to where they can access it and communicate that information to your customers. And that is marketing.
Marketing plays a critical role in meeting the customer’s needs, by producing products that create utility. Utility is the ability of your product to satisfy both functional and emotional needs of your customers.
Always remember satisfaction of your customers is the goal for your business. For a product to offer satisfaction its consumers, it must have benefits that are inherent to it, such that it will always satisfy that customer every time he/she uses that product. That is commonly referred to as a product at performance.
A satisfied customer will tell others and this will lead to more customers and a good product is supposed to do exactly that. In marketing this is referred to as having a customer for life that leaping maximum benefits from the entire life of a customer.
When you have a customer for life, buying x units every day, continuously for 30 years, this is called customer value.
X customers multiplied by y customer values multiplied by z years is what is called brand equity. High brand equity is a dream of every marketer worth his/her salt.
Always remember that marketing is a process. Your online business makes money by satisfying your target customers’ needs. This is based on their lifestyles, values, needs demographics and any other underlying attributes of your target customer segments.
Catch up with my other articles on marketing online business at my blog's archives.
Francis K. Kamau has been in market research for the last 12 years. He has managed market research project for market segmentation across many products, new product development, customer satisfaction, advertisement research among other research projects. He has 5 blogs to his name, this includes t http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com/ and http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com/ .
Posts
