Marketing – Everything you need to know about it

Marketing Concept and Difinition:

According to the American Marketing Institute, the definition and concept of  Marketing: “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”.

Modern marketing concepts as we know them today are defined as an advanced mix of strategy and technology. However, it was not always like this. To clarify, the history of marketing as we know it began with modest beginnings of attempts to sell goods and services. In short, the attempts to achieve this may be as old as civilization itself.

Marketing Beginnings and History:

Regarding the marketing beginnings, at first, some may think that the sellers were trying to supply the goods in a certain way for trading. Further, they focused their efforts on properly offering goods and services from ancient times to complete the sale.

This activity may not have been known as a marketing concept at the time. But this is where it started to evolve.

The modern marketing concepts we understand today actually started at the time of the Industrial Revolution.

Meanwhile, this period extended to the late 18th century and lasted well into the 19th century. It was a time of rapid social changes driven by innovations in the scientific and technological industries.

During the Industrial Revolution, it became easier to buy goods than to make things themselves. Therefore, the massive production created many industries that operate in the same market. Consequently, to meet the growing needs of consumers.

In addition, the infrastructure of transportation and media were also in control.

Subsequently, it created a need for producers to find better ways to develop the products customers needed. Moreover, to develop more sophisticated approaches to inform the customers of these goods.

Increased competition in the market

From the early 20th century until the late 1940s, competition in the business world became intense. Therefore, the need to increase sales using marketing techniques became an essential part of the competition. Subsequently, the capacity to develop and market a brand has also grown appropriately in terms of value.

The competition has led to the need to increase the output of production and market shares in all industries. As a result, marketing began to focus on distribution methods and the communication of consumers as well. Most importantly, the aim soon became to convince consumers that the goods and services provided by one company were better than those offered by their competitors selling the same commodity.

As technology progressed, new and more complex products began to emerge, so competition started to get more complicated, especially since competition was no longer only local but global.

In addition, new terms -such as customer satisfaction- and phases -such as the art of marketing- began to emerge as major areas to be studied other than sales and corporate governance.

A quick look at how marketing began and the main stages of its development over time:

Phase I – The Birth of Marketing:

Large-scale production and efficiency prevailed during the early 20th century. Subsequently, the rapid and large-scale transfer of goods was a priority, so marketing went into effect to move things around.

Phase II – The Age of Sales:

In the 1920s, both “salesmen” and “Sales yard” were born where men were actively pursuing sales and urging consumers to buy the goods, even if they didn’t need them.

Phase III – The Age of Marketing:

The 1950s saw a rise in market research. Helping companies sell what consumers wanted to purchase, instead of the continuous attempts to persuade them to buy useless goods.

Phase IV – The Era of Relationship Marketing:

During the 1990s, sellers took some values from the “sales era” after that. They decided to change the grade of their sales not only to drive one sale. On the contrary, they aimed to build a relationship between the company and the client. In short, this point was the beginning of the first assessment of the recommendations.

Phase V – The Age of Community Marketing:

After a short period of successful cross-relationship marketing, the activation of the strategies that focus on the customers was put into the business. In addition to putting them in the heart of the company and its campaigns as well.

In fact, this was due to mixing the values of market research in the 1950s with relationship building in the 1990s. Which ultimately creates client-focused strategies.

Phase VI – Digital Marketing:

That is the age we live in now. In short, it is shaped by society’s reliance on technology and the Internet.

The use of this technology to access markets and pave the way for small companies to upgrade. Without a doubt, the values of traditional marketing should not be replaced, but digital/ modern marketing has become more valuable to large and small companies as well.

Modern Marketing Concept:

Philip Cotler was the first to speak about marketing and gave this topic rightfully as a science, not just a set of theories.

Cotler published three books, which are:

1- The Marketing Management

2- The Principles of Marketing

3- Cotler on Marketing

In which he collected successful cases for companies, explaining how companies can succeed through these practices.

That is where the concept of modern marketing started and emerged. After that, we started to get rid of the idea that marketing simply means sales or just an advertisement in a newspaper or a poster in the street.

Marketing and its importance

Its importance lie in the process of identifying the needs of consumers, in addition to the circumstances of the market.

After that, it is about building and developing a strategy that targets a specific market segment. As well as developing its distinctive products, along with the appropriate pricing and advertising for consumer tastes.

Modern Marketing Functions:

1- Distribution -The strategy of distribution

The distribution strategy requires focusing on how the company provides its products or services to the customer.

This strategy can vary depending on the service or commodity it provides. Due to the existence of different distribution channels, so, the distribution strategy must be taken into consideration when developing an idea.

2- Financing – the role of marketing in business

If you want to launch a successful marketing campaign, you will need money, but the question is: how are you going to manage this money? Are you going to put all your budget into one campaign or will you distribute it?

To clarify, this is why you need to create a smart financial plan that determines how you spend your marketing budget based on your goals and potentials.

3- Market research – The importance of market research

Market research is about conducting researches about the target population so you can build a reliable marketing strategy.

For this reason, it is arguably the most important of the seven jobs.

Effective market research requires the use of tools to figure out who to target based on what you sell.

If you’re a tech company that invented a new social network infrastructure, are you targeting people aged 80 or 20?

If you want to take a more in-depth look at how you do market research, this article is a good starting point.

4- Product pricing

Once you know how to do market research, after that, you will find that the market research can also help you set prices.

Therefore, you need to make sure that you don’t waste your profits by selling at a very low price. And on the other hand, you wouldn’t want to increase the price and then lose all the profit because customers have found another alternative who is a competitor of yours.

For this reason, you need to analyze your competitors using a SWOT analysis or any different tool.

5- Product and service management – Measuring the effectiveness of advertising

In order to gain the trust of your clients, you must constantly make improvements to the product or service you provide.

By following customer feedback and online reviews, you can figure out what works and what doesn’t. Moreover, you need to know how to build a competitive advantage for your business so your business can stand out among competitors.

In addition, using marketing performance metrics is an intelligent way to keep up with service management.

6- Promotion – What is marketing promotion?

The promotion includes confirming the appearance of your ads in the right places by the right people.

Without a doubt, you’d want to make sure that there’s a lot of advertising for your brand. As well as keeping up with popular advertising strategies, writing valuable and inspiring content that can attract the attention of your potential clients.

7- Sales – What is the difference between sales and marketing?

The process of selling and marketing is not the same as it might seem to some, but they are related processes that complement each other.

The sales process begins once the market research is done and identifying what your potential client’s wants and needs are.

With this change, many disciplines and specializations have emerged within marketing itself, each contributing to strengthening your brand and increasing its market value, thereby doubling your sales.

To summarize,

After reviewing the definition, meaning, history, role, functions, and the stages of marketing, you must now have a clearer understanding of marketing and its importance in order to improve the image of your brand in the market and among your competitors, as well as increase your profits.

If you have more inquiries about marketing, we would be more than happy to respond to them in the comments.

Additionally, you can contact us and request a marketing consultation offered by our team of marketing professionals.