6. What is the aim of marketing?

The main aim of marketing is selling and advertising, but marketing people should be involved not just involved in promotion sales but in all aspects of the marketing mix.

Most people and many managers do not understand the aim of marketing in modern business.

Marketing is two things. First, it is a strategy and set of techniques to sell an organization's products or services. This involves choosing target customers and designing a persuasive marketing mix to get them to buy. The mix may include a range of brands, tempting prices, convenient sales outlets and a battery of advertising and promotions. This concept of marketing as selling and persuasion is by far the most popular idea among both managers and the public.

The second, and by far more important concept of marketing, focuses on improving the reality of what is on offer. It is based on understanding customers' needs and developing new solutions which are better than those currently available. Doing this is not a marketing department problem, but one which involves the whole organization.

For example, for Rover to beat Mercedes for the consumer's choice involves engineering new models, developing lean manufacturing processes, and restructuring its dealer network. Creating company-wide focus on the customer requires the continual acquisition of new skills and technology. Marketing is rarely effective as a business function. As the chief executive of Hewlett Packard put it: 'Marketing is too important to leave to the marketing department.' Such companies understand that everybody's task is marketing. This concept of marketing offering real customer value is what business is all about.

7. What elements does marketing mix include?

A business firm controls four important elements of marketing which are called a marketing mix.

A firm's marketing mix is the combination of the product, the price of the product, the means for its distribution, and the promotion of the product to reach a firm's target market.

A firm can vary its marketing mix by changing any one or more of these ingredients. Thus a firm may use one marketing mix to reach one target market and a second, somewhat different marketing mix, to reach another target market. For example, most automakers produce several different types of vehicles and aim them at different market segments based on age and income.

1) The product ingredient of the marketing mix includes deci­sions about the product's design, brand name, packaging, warran­ties, and the like.

2) The pricing ingredient includes both base prices and dis­counts of various kinds. Pricing decisions are intended to achieve particular goals, such as to maximize profit or even to make room for new models. The rebates offered by automobile manufactur­ers are a pricing strategy developed to boost low auto sales.

3) The distribution ingredient involves not only transportation and storage but also the selection of intermediaries.

4) The promotion ingredient focuses on providing information to target markets. The major forms of promotion include advertis­ing and publicity.

The "ingredients" of the marketing mix are controllable ele­ments. A firm can vary each of them to suit its organizational goals, marketing goals, and target markets.

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“We must be smarter at devising packages of services that our customers want and pricing them attractively. Set the marketing department free to shape new packages. Don't confine it to coming up with cute names for offerings designedly engineers and accountants.” *Peter Martin, 'A second chance for telecoms', Financial Times, 18 December 2001

This sums up the position of marketing in many companies, where it is often seen as a fancy name for selling or advertising. But, as the quote shows, marketing people should be involved not just in promoting sales but in all aspects of the marketing mix:

• product: deciding what products or services to sell in the first place

• prices: selling-prices that are attractive to particular groups of customers (segments) and that are profitable for the company

• place: finding suitable distribution channels to reach these customer groups and

• promotion: all the activities, not just advertising, used to support the product - everything from pre-sales information to after-sales service.

These are the four Ps of the marketing mix, the 'levers' of a company's marketing machine, levers that it can adjust in different ways for different products and different buyers.

Another way of looking at this is from the point of view of customers, with the four Cs. From this perspective, the marketing mix is expressed in terms of:

• customer solution: offering the right product to satisfy particular customer needs

• customer cost: the price paid directly by the customer to buy the product, including the 'price' involved in not buying another product of the same or another type

• convenience: distributing the product in the way most suitable for each type of customer

• communication: exchanging information with the customer. Customers are informed about products through advertising, sales literature and so on, but customers also communicate with the seller, for example through customer helplines. This is a good way for sellers to find out more about customers and their requirements and to change or improve their offer.

Thinking of the marketing mix in these terms helps sellers maintain a customer orientation - a focus on customer needs.