Essay on Defining Marketing

Submitted By marcomardueno
Words: 805
Pages: 4

Defining Marketing MKT 421 Defining Marketing According to the “American Marketing Association” (2012), “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” (Definition of Marketing). Marketing is also defined as “performance of activities that seek to accomplish an organization’s objectives by anticipating customer or client needs and directing a flow of need satisfying goods and services from producer to customer or client” (Perreault, Cannon, & McCarthy, 2011, p. 6). I define marketing as the steps a company takes to make consumers want or need their products or services. Proper advertising, promotions, and sales part of a company’s marketing division. In a nutshell, marketing is what makes or breaks a company. Marketing is an essential part of a company’s continued success. A company that provides a product or a service must know what their potential customers want. When a company knows the needs of their customers, the company will know which route it must take to fulfill that need. With a good marketing strategy a company will sell that product or service with no problem because prior to the release of the product or service, the company would have already created the demand for that product or service. A successful company must also market their product or service in a way that draws new customers and retains current customers. So the mission of marketing is to meet the customer’s needs so well that the product or service sold will sell on its own (Perreault, Cannon, & McCarthy, 2011). McDonald’s Restaurant has a very good example of good marketing. When McDonald’s saw that many people wanted a high-end coffee, they dove into the market with its Premium Roast coffee. It turned out to be a successful idea for McDonald’s. The company had a 40% increase in coffee sales in less than a year (Perreault, Cannon, & McCarthy, 2011). McDonald’s went in the coffee business with companies like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. This is good for the customers because the company must continue making customers happy and coming back with lower prices or better products. The Indian company Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) came up with a marketing strategy to reach about 600 million people across India (Perreault, Cannon, & McCarthy, 2011). HUL was primarily only reaching customers who lived in urban areas of India, which only counts for about one-fourth of the population of India. The other three-fourths of the population still live in rural areas. So HUL came up with a program where women entrepreneurs sell and market their products to the people residing in rural areas. The women have gatherings to teach and show the people the benefits of using their products. HUL made their products smaller and affordable to the people living in rural areas. This created jobs for the women entrepreneurs and helped HUL reach nearly 600 million customers throughout the country. In the 1980s a man named Guy Laliberte and a few of his fellow entertainers saw that the circus industry was in bad shape. They saw an opportunity not