In Marketing in the 21st Century by Evans and Berman, marketing is defined as the “anticipation, management, and satisfaction of demand through the exchange process.” According to the American Marketing Association: Marketing “is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
Wow, that is a mouthful (even if one of those definitions is from me. 🙂 ).
So, let’s take a more “real world” perspective about the role of marketing, as described by Daniel Newman for Forbes:
“Perhaps the greatest misconception in the world of marketing is that the role of the marketer is to drive awareness to the brand. In reality, marketers are first and foremost responsible for creating customers; awareness is merely one portion of the buyer’s journey. With the proliferation of digital marketing, social media, and the hyper-aware consumer, the journey has changed a little bit and the role of marketing has evolved with it. Having said that, the growth of new channels hasn’t changed the fact that marketers are supposed to be creating customers, but what it has done is make many of our marketing efforts more measurable.”
Click Newman’s photo to read more.
Before taking the class, I actually did think that spreading awareness and telling people why they should buy the product were the marketers biggest job. Helping design the ads, logos and slogans and choosing where they should be, like billboards or on Facebook. I know now that marketing is a lot harder and more time consuming than that. I assumed that customer satisfaction was entirely up to public relations, not something a marketer would do to bring customers back again.
The role of marketing in my mind has a lot to do with advertising and collecting statistics on how effective a certain strategy is. what I think a lot of people don’t understand is how number heavy and logistic heavy marketing is. The main core of marketing is to try to create the best possible product for the consumer by giving them what they believe they want. What I find most interesting is how goods are marketed to people based on their wants, but marketing also plays a very large role is showing the people what they want as well. So marketing in general is just a way of broadcasting products to their consumers, and adjusting to their needs to maximize their profits.
I believe that if you can market and advertise a product well you can sell anything. I used to think that marketing was solely just advertising and making people aware of the product. I agree now that that is only a little piece of the buyers journey but I do think that if you do that well you’ll be able to create customers
I believe that the role of marketing involves a lot of advertising, customer service, and the products that are being sold as well. It involves how well the product is being marketed and advertised as well as the effectiveness of the strategy being used to market it. Basically the main goal is to attract as many people as possible to this product or idea and being successful in following the consumers needs. Marketing is largely involved in satisfying consumers on exactly what they want but marketing also has the power to convince a consumer that what they have is what they want. Marketing has control in creating fantasies and coming up with something to make a consumer want it, which is the most interesting and amazing thing that i have noticed as i have learned about marketing.
I would agree with your idea that the role of marketing is to create customers and not just raise brand awareness, in terms of the four P’s raising brand awareness only fits into promotions but marketting also includes what products you offer to which people for what need, what prices you charge and how does that affect your business, and finally how do you get the product from the manufacturers to the consumers. Without all these functions there couldnt be a business and there certainly would be no customers.
Personally, I think the primary objective for marketing is to inspire the demand of customers about certain products by using promotion methods, advertising or public relationship. At the same time, raise the awareness of brand, deliver the useful information to customers, and exchange the ideas and improvement with customers are all important factors involved in marketing process. I think product innovation is a best way to help customers to find which they really need by develop blue ocean market of each industry.