Marketing

Abstract

For most people, the first thing that comes to mind when the subject of marketing comes up is advertising, in forms such as television commercials, newspaper inserts, or billboards at the side of the road. Modern society has become so permeated by these advertisements that it is not difficult to conjure up numerous examples of them. However, there is more to the field of marketing than simply finding new ways to draw consumer attention to particular products. At its heart, marketing is simply a way of managing relationships between providers of products and services and those who purchase and/or consume those products.

Overview

Marketing is concerned with a particular type of relationship called an exchange relationship. While this may sound like an abstract concept, its definition is a straightforward one. An exchange relationship is one in which two or more parties voluntarily exchange products, services, or units of value such as currency. The place, whether physical or virtual, where these exchanges occur is the market, so the act of managing the exchanges is known as marketing. More specifically, marketing seeks to encourage particular types of exchanges, to encourage exchanges involving particular parties, or both (Kurtin, 2016).

For example, if the state of California launches an advertising campaign to encourage people in other parts of the world to visit California on their vacations, this would be encouragement of a particular type of exchange: tourism, in which consumers spend money in exchange for memorable experiences. If, instead, a hotel chain with locations throughout California created a commercial to encourage people to come and stay at its hotels, this would be an example of encouraging an exchange involving a particular party, the hotel chain. In the first case, the goal is to get tourists to come to the state and spend money, while in the second case the goal is to get tourists to come to a specific hotel chain and pay to stay there.

At first blush, many people assume that marketing always involves money. This is because the interaction that most people have with marketing is usually through the medium of advertising (Saetang & Pathomsirikul, 2016). In the modern world, people are continuously bombarded with appeals to spend money on various products, whether on television, via the Internet, through radio and print, and even text message advertising. In reality, however, marketing can often be performed by nonprofit organizations, governments, and other entities wishing to spread their messages without necessarily implicating a purchase of some kind.

A government might, for example, wish to use marketing to remind people to vote in upcoming elections or to file their taxes on time. Similarly, a nonprofit organization might market itself to raise awareness in the community about who the organization is and what it does (Wendt, Griesbaum & Kölle, 2016).

As with most topics, there are a variety of approaches or orientations to marketing that one may adopt, and those engaged in marketing as a part of their profession will usually have a preference for one style over others. To a certain extent, each orientation is concerned with a particular part of the product life cycle and de-emphasizes other phases of the cycle, usually for an intentional purpose.

Product Orientation. The most straightforward marketing orientation is a product orientation. When an organization has a product orientation for its marketing, its focus is on making sure that the product being produced is consistently of high quality.

Product orientation reached its height during the 1950s and 1960s, and is based on an assumption that consumers do not really need to be convinced to purchase the product. As long as the product is high in quality, then people will seek it out and purchase it. This type of marketing orientation tends to be observed more frequently during periods of economic prosperity and expansion, when consumers have money to spend and producers can rely upon large numbers of people wanting to have the latest and most highly regarded items available for purchase, with little or no convincing necessary (Zwick & Bradshaw, 2016).

Customer-Oriented Marketing. A more contemporary orientation to marketing is customer-oriented marketing. Instead of focusing on the product and assuming people will want to buy it, a customer-oriented approach begins by trying to figure out what consumers want. This process involves the identification of gaps in the marketplace—that is, opportunities to supply something that consumers desire, but which is not yet available.

To identify these gaps, organizations conduct market research about various activities, interests, and occupations, in which they collect information from consumers through surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations, and other methods. The information collected from these sources is then used in the research and development process to design new products or services that will fulfill consumers’ unmet needs. Developing products in this fashion can take months or even years, as prototypes are built, tested, refined, and tested again, and then piloted in the market to see how consumers respond to them.

If the response is favorable, then the product may go into production, at which time marketing efforts will once again ramp up, to make consumers aware of the new product and its features. Clearly, the customer orientation is a much more labor intensive marketing approach, but the hope is that by more closely studying consumer desires, sales figures will be much higher than they otherwise would be, since the final product will more closely resemble what consumers feel that they need in their lives.

The customer-orientation approach tends to be employed by larger organizations because they are more likely to have the resources needed to support an extensive market research campaign and the kind of research and development facilities needed to make consumer wishes into real products. Larger companies are also more likely to have a customer orientation to marketing because they tend to be in very close competition with other firms, thus justifying the investments in market research.

Relationship Marketing. The trend in marketing over the last few decades has been to shift the focus from the product to the sales process, and finally to the customer. Companies that were originally preoccupied with perfecting their own products gradually became aware of the value in learning about their customers and basing their product offerings on what customers say they want. Recently this trend has taken another step forward, in the form of a new approach called relationship marketing. Companies that use the relationship-marketing approach view a sale not as the end of the company’s interaction with the customer, but as the beginning. Relationship marketing focuses not simply on motivating consumers to purchase a particular product, but to feel connected to the company as a whole, and to build up feelings of loyalty and identity that will keep the customer for life.

This approach can require companies to expand their customer support resources so that if there are issues with products, customers do not feel that they have been abandoned by a company that was only interested in taking their money. It can also affect the behavior of sales teams trying to convince customers to make purchases. For example, sales staff may be instructed to focus less on making the sale and more on listening to the customer and helping them figure out what they really need, even if that turns out to be a product or service that the company does not offer (Metcalf, Neill, Simon, Dobson & Davis, 2016).

Further Insights

Marketing has undergone a significant transformation with the advent of the internet. On one level, the internet has provided myriad new communication platforms that companies may use to reach out to their customers.

EMail Marketing. One of these platforms is email, which companies use regularly to inform customers about new products, sales, and other developments. Often these messages are unsolicited, meaning that the recipients did not ask to receive the information, and that they are being sent by the company to a huge list of people in the hope that a small percentage of those who get the message will respond with interest.

Many consider these unsolicited sales emails to be junk, or “spam.” The proliferation of junk email has given rise to a whole industry of software developers, marketers, and salespeople who offer customers email filtering software to help them avoid receiving so much spam (Grundy, Bero & Malone, 2016).

Pay-per-Click. Email is far from the only platform the internet has made available. Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn allow millions of people to interact on a daily basis, and many derive a significant amount of their financial support from advertising messages displayed to users, making them into platforms focused on marketing as much as on communicating. Many of the advertisements placed on social networks by marketing teams are set up on a pay-per-click basis, meaning that each time a user clicks on an ad to find out more about it, the company that paid for the advertisement pays the marketing company a small amount of money, which is shared with the social network site as well. (In some cases the money is paid directly to the social network).

The pay-per-click revenue model works because of the huge numbers of people that participate in social networks (Jiang, Ramkissoon & Mavondo, 2016). If even one out of every thousand users of the social network decides to click an ad, income can amount to millions of dollars per year. Marketing teams are often drawn to this type of online advertising because it has the potential to reach such a large audience. Anyone on Earth with an internet connection becomes a part of the audience for the advertisement, meaning that the ad is highly cost effective.

In order to further utilize the marketing word-of-mouth potential of social media sites, some companies have begun offering payments or gifts to users of sites such as Instagram and Facebook who are considered particularly influential due to the number of followers and friends obtained (though businesses often have to be wary of fake followers and unauthentic user profiles) in exchange for them inserting posts about the company or its products on their social media pages (Detwiler, 2018).

Issues

Marketing online has also created some new career options for those with technical skills, through the creation of the field of search engine optimization (SEO) under the broader umbrella of marketing. SEO is the process of configuring a website so that search engines such as Google and Yahoo will give that web page greater relevance, and therefore a higher ranking, when they index it (Ahmed, 2016). These days, people all over the world perform millions of searches every day, many of them looking for information that marketers would like to connect them with. In many cases, a user will search for a generic product to solve a particular problem. They do not have a specific brand or manufacturer in mind but simply want something that will “get rid of grey hair,” or “clean hardwood floors.” When these types of searches are entered into an online search engine, there are many different websites that the search engine could choose to display. Those sites that have been optimized by a specialist for SEO will be placed higher in the list of results, meaning that users will see them first and are therefore more likely to click on them.

SEO accomplishes this through different strategies, such as including numerous keywords and phrases into the searchable text of the website so that the indexing software used by search engines will estimate that the optimized site offers more information about the topic than competitor sites (Witkowski & Jones, 2016). When considering SEO, businesses will also want to keep an eye on the functionality of links directing users to the website and the spelling of the business's name around the internet. Additionally, companies can take advantage of metric tools such as Google Analytics to determine where users landing on the website are coming from and what the website's "bounce rate" is, or the number of users who come to the site but leave without clicking any further, a factor that could be harmful to SEO rankings (Schulman, 2016).

SEO, pay-per-click ads, and email solicitations all represent something of a move backward for marketers. The trend over the years has been for companies to move their focus of attention away from their products and production processes and toward the consumer, in an effort to better understand what people want and thereby gain an advantage over their competitors by designing products better suited to people’s desires. Most online advertising uses an approach that has been likened to a fisherman casting a wide net. Instead of trying to get to know individuals as a way of better serving them and others who are similarly situated, online marketing uses the fact that it reaches an enormous population to allow it to rely on statistics and the law of averages to get people to click, even if it is only a tiny fraction of the overall marketplace.

Under this approach, marketers may only see inquiries from a minute segment of the population receiving the ad, but because so little effort had to be expended to obtain those inquiries, the marketing effort is still perceived to be successful. Still, the question has been posed, for how long a period this type of marketing will remain sustainable. No significant increase in the amount of work required to distribute online ads is expected in the near future (Barton, 2016). But some observers suspect that the returns produced by those ads will diminish from year to year, as Internet users continue to become more sophisticated and less tolerant of the distraction of online marketing.

Terms & Concepts

Exchange Relationship: An interaction in which parties trade products, services, or units of value.

Focus Group: A group of consumers gathered together to be interviewed about their preferences regarding products and services, as part of market research.

Market Gap: A space in the marketplace where there is an unfilled need among consumers.

Market Segmentation: An approach to marketing in which the overall marketplace is divided up into smaller segments, with each segment being defined by a demographic characteristic or by a purchasing pattern or preference. This allows the entity doing the marketing to concentrate its efforts on those segments where success is most probable.

Relationship Marketing: Relationship marketing places its emphasis on building a long term connection between the customer and the company.

Social Network: An online community that allows users to create accounts and post information and messages to one another.

Bibliography

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Grundy, Q., Bero, L. A., and Malone, R. E. (2016). Marketing and the most trusted profession: The invisible interactions between registered nurses and industry. Annals of Internal Medicine, 164(11), 733–740.

Jiang, Y., Ramkissoon, H., & Mavondo, F. (2016). Destination marketing and visitor experiences: The development of a conceptual framework. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 25(6), 653–675. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=116620527&site=ehost-live

Kurtin, K. S. (2016). Social media strategy: Marketing and advertising in the consumer revolution. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 93(3), 694–695. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=117270218&site=ehost-live

Metcalf, L. E., Neill, S., R. Simon, L., Dobson, S., & Davis, B. (2016). The impact of peer mentoring on marketing content mastery. Marketing Education Review, 26(3), 126–142. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=117575084&site=ehost-live

Saetang, W., & Pathomsirikul, Y. (2016). Marketing strategy model for building customer loyalty in feed wholesale business. International Journal of Behavioral Science, 11(2), 109–126.

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Wendt, L. M., Griesbaum, J., and Kölle, R. (2016). Product advertising and viral stealth marketing in online videos. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 68(3), 250–264.

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Suggested Reading

Buccoliero, L., Bellio, E., Mazzola, M., & Solinas, E. (2016). A marketing perspective to “delight” the “patient 2.0”: New and challenging expectations for the health care provider. BMC Health Services Research, 16, 1–12.

Childs, M. L., & Jin, B. (2016). Do status symbols in marketing increase product evaluations? An experimental analysis of group differences on product evaluations for scarce and brand-presence products. Journal of International Consumer Marketing, 28(3), 154–168. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=115010823&site=ehost-live

Susnienė, D., & Žostautiene, D. (2016). Synergy of corporate and marketing culture in fostering corporate social responsibility. Journal of Promotion Management, 22(2), 209–223. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=114149227&site=ehost-live

Verma, V., Sharma, D., & Sheth, J. (2016). Does relationship marketing matter in online retailing? A meta-analytic approach. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 44(2), 206–217. Retrieved October 23, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=112860880&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Wilkinson, G. (2016). Marketing in schools, commercialization and sustainability: Policy disjunctures surrounding the commercialization of childhood and education for sustainable lifestyles in England. Educational Review, 68(1), 56–70.