Marketing is about the company’s ability to understand customers. It is purpose lies in dealing with their requirements, solving them, and making a profit. Here, the concept of profitability is born.
No business gets very far without meeting just the needs of those with a financial interest (investors and employees), and these only progress when customers remain satisfied. The fundamental point of marketing is to solve those customers’ needs better than competitors and make them feel the real value they obtain in that interaction.
Marketing is the administrative synergy of the strategies that study the market’s behavior, verify its audiences’ needs, and commercially manage a client’s interactions with a company.
Something that helps me organize a company is to clarify to the stakeholders, from the planning phase, that the marketing concept can refer to a description of a position or a corporate/collaborative area, to the company’s activities for commercial purposes, or a business approach.
Marketing as an organizational function
Marketing in recent years has become one of the management buzzwords and has taken it away from its meaning; a classic example is that even the complaints department is now considered part of the marketing area. The term is also a synonym for advertising, public relations, market research, and even merchandising (promotional).
If we understand marketing as an organizational function, it is comprehensive; it is a fundamental planning and operating system that includes various activities to execute a strategy with a clear corporate objective. In this way, marketing is not the visible results or the manifestations of the sales action (how it is often evaluated). However, it is the organizational strategy of the disciplines based on an execution plan that responds to the famous modern marketing actions: Promotion, Sales, Product Management, Information (business intelligence), Price, Financing, and Distribution, and with the final objective of making good use of the resources to close deals based on the company’s vision.
It is often thought that when we call someone a marketer, that person absolves others (professionals) of the responsibility of serving a client, solving their problems, charging them, and being worried that that client leaves satisfied.
Marketing as activities or techniques
Everyday activities a company performs are directly or indirectly linked to its clients. For instance, market research, public relations, customer service, and advertising all fall under the umbrella term “marketing”, as they serve the purpose of reaching out to customers in one way or another.
If everything is reduced to the steps to solve the most basic business equation, exchange of goods = (purchase decision) x (a need), marketing could be defined as the techniques applied to a sales process: the approach to the market (whether or not it is called market research). ), the planning and operation of the integral marketing function, the management of the commercial relationship, all promotion methods, the budget’s design and control, the evaluation of results, and the management and comparison of internal data with external data to find out the famous but impossible to measure (for many businesses) ROIs.
As a technique, marketing is often used to inundate clients with various selling actions in the hopes of convincing them to stay with the company. However, this narrow-minded approach to marketing can lead to disappointment and dissatisfaction, ultimately traumatizing the customer for life. Naturally, this stressful plan is typically employed as a strategy.
It is a common expectation that marketing should make a company profitable, as the owners and C-Suite executives voiced. However, this raises several questions. What is the role of sales in this regard? What about production? Can’t a company’s profitability also be attributed to its production processes? Moreover, how can operations contribute to improving sales?
The Holistic Concept of Marketing
This idea of marketing has its origin in analyzing the total activity of the company where each of the areas and departments respond to a collective way of thinking; Stanton would define that the integral concept of marketing is based on the fact that the planning, policy, and operation of a company must be focused on the client and that the most crucial objective is to increase the volume of sales, that is, to make a promise profitable.
In this sense, Drucker strengthens the idea that marketing is a corporate philosophy because product-oriented or product-led and customer-oriented or market-led terms are essential in general management. What a customer thinks he buys and what he considers to be of value is critical to success.
Some companies have not ceased to be profitable because the market has become saturated or because there is no demand, but they, themselves, have yet to focus their actions on solving increasingly specialized needs or simply expanding their horizon. A clear example is the railways; they have seen themselves as railway businesses, not transportation businesses.
The integrality of marketing makes more sense in the management world; it is not an area, it is not an activity; it is a philosophy that runs through all departments, collaborators, directors, bosses, and other positions and connects the work of the company with the satisfaction of a client; this finally is the social justification of its existence.
This argument is not new since, in 1776, Smith wrote:
“Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production, and the producer’s interest ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.”
After almost 250 years, the marketing concept as a philosophy doesn’t sound so bad. The paradigm of complexity, which human beings love so much, has enabled the building of more sophisticated companies, encouraged consumer markets and buyers to be more specialized in the requirements they want from a brand, and made marketing systems more innovative, less intrusive, and more human.
It may be true that all businesses are reduced to two elemental functions that work: marketing and innovation; the rest is cost, as Drucker wrote in 1985. Be careful! Digital Marketing is another story, another invention -perhaps misleading- that is more about strategy(s) than philosophy. What is behind exchanging goods? Not only money but also moments and feelings. There lives the concept of Marketing.
