Unit 3 - Making It Happen with Marketing
Learning Target 1: I can explain what marketing is
If I were to ask you what is marketing how would you respond? Some of you would say advertising, others would say selling and both would partially correct. Marketing is all activities involved to get a good or a service to a customer or consumer. Before we move into the activities lets dig a little deeper into goods and services.
Services are intangible products that other people perform. For example, the hotel's shuttle-bus driver is performing the service of transporting guests from one location to another. Goods are tangible products. For example, the hotel has a gift shop where tourist can buy many goods, such as souvenirs for their family.
Successful companies understand that in order to succeed they must be good at marketing. They must spend considerable amount of time, effort and resources on determining the needs and wants of their customers. Once they have a good understanding of this, they need to figure out how to satisfy their needs and wants while making a profit. This is what is called the marketing concept.
One important point is that businesses must know the needs and wants of the market before products are produced or else they may ultimately lose money in the long run. If a business does not satisfy the needs and wants of its customers, their customers will find other companies to satisfy their needs and wants.
Show What You Know How does marketing for a product like souvenirs differ from marketing a theme park or a credit union?
Now let’s look at what are the marketing activities these activities are also called the marketing functions. Depending on where you look you will find between 6 and 9 functions of marketing. For this chapter I am going to list 9 to give you the widest viewpoint of what marketing is.
The functions of marketing are as follows
Marketing Information Management - Gathering, recording and analyzing information
Product Service Planning - Developing new products and bringing them to market
Pricing - Deciding what to sell your good or service for
Risk Management - Looking a sources for potential losses and either accepting, transferring or avoiding that risk
Financing - Finding the money to conduct business.
Promotion - Informing, reminding and persuading the customer / consumer to buy
Purchasing - The activity of acquiring goods and services to accomplish the business goals
Selling - Trying to get the customer to exchange money for your product or service.
Distribution - getting your product to customer from the manufacture
Watch this video for some more details on what marketing is.
As you can see marketing is much more than just advertising and selling. An easy way to explain what marketing does is having the right product, at the right price, at the right place, at the right time and communicate it effectively to the customer.
Make The Connection: Now that you know what marketing is, who do you think is the best marketer of all time. Make sure you site examples of as many functions as possible.