Marketing is the process of creating exchange. It is the practice of satisfying a customer’s needs, wants, and demands with a product or service and a way of providing value and satisfaction to a customer through exchange and transaction.
When people think of marketing, they mainly think of promotion, and although this is a major component, there’s a little more to it than that. It is about bringing the right product to the right people for the right price, by using the right promotional and distribution techniques.
The Key Concepts of Marketing
The core concept of marketing is about achieving a mutual, beneficial, and voluntary exchange of value between an organisation and a customer.
It involves learning about your customers, their needs and wants, and what the market demands. It’s about understanding your competition, deciding which market to target or where to niche, and creating offers that are compelling and persuasive.
Sales as a concept is a one-way exchange and is defined as the transfer of value from the producer to the consumer with no particular concern for who is buying.
Whereas the concept of marketing is about satisfying the customer. Marketing focuses on achieving your organisation’s long-term goal by meeting your customers’ needs and wants in exchange for your organisation making a profit.
Marketing is not just about advertising: it is about providing satisfaction and meeting the needs of your customers; being alert to changes in the market; and being aware of the efforts of your competitors.
To achieve this, we need to understand how customers make decisions and their behaviour’s. What is their need for your product or service?
Understanding the Needs of Your Customer
Marketing Myopia refers to when a business takes a narrow-minded approach to marketing and focuses solely on what they think is best for the market, not what the market tells them is the best.
An example of this is how Netflix was able to overtake Blockbuster in the home video industry, by creating a subscription-based DVD-by-mail service, and then going on to fundamentally change the way we rent movies.
A sales business model often focuses on the needs of the seller and doesn’t always result in satisfied customers or profitable companies. Instead of asking, ‘Who can we sell this to?’, a marketing model asks, ‘What do people want and how can we provide it?’ Marketing focuses on the needs of the buyer. If we can see ourselves as potential customers, then we can better understand our customer’s behaviour and what makes them want to buy.
Outside in Marketing focuses on the customer’s experience. It aims to make the customer’s experience memorable by looking at your marketing strategy from the customer’s perspective.
- What are their challenges/pain points?
- How can you provide a solution to these challenges/pain points?
- Are you meeting their needs?
- Are you making it easy for them to do business with you?
- Is the experience enjoyable for them?
- What is their feedback?
For a business to be successful in marketing it must know its target market, deliver what is most valued to its customers, and be alert to changes in the market over time.
Value and Satisfaction
Value is a core concept of marketing. If you know your value and you can provide it better than anyone else, people will return to purchase your product or service time and time again.
Marketing value involves your price, quality, staff, customer service, sales, the product or service’s features, promotion, packaging, etc., etc. Marketing aims to develop a mutually beneficial exchange between the buyer and the seller, where both parties feel that they have benefited from the transaction and are better off.
Let’s say, for example, you want to buy a loaf of bread. You should feel that owning that loaf of bread is a far better outcome than keeping the money you plan to spend on that loaf of bread in your pocket, and in return the shop sells the bread to you because they want to make a profit. That’s a mutually beneficial exchange.
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