What Is Marketing? – Principles, Types & Scope

It’s no doubt that the single most important element of a business that is responsible for consistent growth is its marketing endeavors.

It is a precise and well structured marketing activity that is carried out with the purpose of optimizing for a better result that sets the difference between a business that will last long in its industry and the one that fails within a short time.

But before I talk about what marketing is, let me quickly mention what marketing is not. Most often than not, marketing is often unused interchangeable with advertising. These two words can be similar but are totally different. Advertising or advertisement is an act of creating a notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event. Basically, advertising is promotion and promotion is just one of the seven functions of marketing.

So, what is marketing?

In its most simple term, marketing is the communication of value to some specific and selected group of people with the purpose of making them take an action. In addition, 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.

Contrary to what most people believe, marketing isn’t just about educating and informing people about a brand and its offering, but everything that is involved in developing the offering, promoting it, selling it, and making the customer buy it (and rebuy it).

A marketing process doesn’t revolve around a product. A marketing process revolves around the customer. It is about analyzing, developing, and delivering an offering that fulfills the needs, wants, and demands of customers while helping the business to make profits.

DEFINITION OF MARKETING

Marketing is a process or set of processes that aims to understand the target audience better, develop a valuable offering, deliver value, and satisfy their needs, wants, and desires.

In general, marketing involves identifying the unmet needs, wants, and desires of the target market, creating a value proposition that satisfies the unmet needs, communicating the value to the target audience, and delivering value to meet those needs.

A simple definition of marketing would be, as Kotler puts it, “meeting the needs of your customer at a profit.” Thus, marketing involves everything that a business requires to meet the needs of its customers, and that too, at a profit.

Besides this, other institutes and renowned individuals define marketing as-

American Marketing Association (AMA)

The science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit.

Dr Philip Kotler

The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.

What Is The Purpose Of Marketing?

Despite what people believe, marketing isn’t just about selling products. With seven marketing functions from pricing to product development, marketing encompasses all aspects of a company and works on fulfilling its goals.

1. Understanding the goals and needs of the customers
2. Developing offerings that meet those needs
3. and communicating and selling the product to generate profit.

What is the importance of marketing

Marketing is essential because it helps businesses consider the customer as a focal point, allowing them to develop sustainable businesses that contribute to society.

It is the heart of the business which collects information from the outside, filter it, and convert it into specialized strategies which help the business fulfil the customer requirements while making profits.

The marketing function links all of the departments of the business together, including product development, distribution, sales, and advertising. This allows the business to follow a holistic approach.

• It investigates: Market research allows businesses to understand the needs, wants, and desires of their customers.
• It produces: Marketing allows businesses to create what customers actually want.
• Marketers play an important role in bringing awareness and engagement to the brand and their offerings.
• They sell: Marketing is important since it helps companies to sell their offerings. It helps them to make money by making them sell the products and services.

What are the objectives of Marketing

The primary goal of marketing is to satisfy customers’ demands while making profits. The five other goals of marketing are:

1. Customer Satisfaction: Satisfying the needs, wants, and demands of the customers.
2. Profitability: Earning profit for the business to support sustainable growth. 
3. Demand Creation: Develop demand for the offerings by communicating about it to the target audience
4. Brand Development: Building a brand out of the company and/or the offering and differentiating it from other players in the market.
5. Create Goodwill And Public Image: Building up a public image of the brand and increasing its equity by providing offerings with a consistent brand promise.

What are the objectives of marketing

Marketing’s main objective is to meet customers’ demands while making profits. In addition to this, marketing has the following five objectives.

• Providing customer satisfaction means meeting their needs, wants, and demands.
• Profitability means earning profits for the business so it can support sustainable growth.
• Market Development: Creating a brand from the company and/or the offerings and keeping it differentiated from others in the market.
• Demand Generation: Communicating the benefits of the offerings to the target audience. Brand Development: Building a brand out of the company and/or the offerings and distinguishing it from other players.
• Building up a public image of the brand and increasing its equity by delivering consistent brand promises.

The four principles of marketing

In marketing, we use four basic principles to organize the transfer of goods from one seller to another. These are commonly referred to as the 4 Ps or marketing mix.

• Product: It is the offering that the company sells or intends to sell.
• Price: It is how much the company charges from the customer for the offering.
• Place: It refers to the point of sale – the place where the offering is offered for sale.
• Promotion: It encompasses all the marketing communication strategies to communicate and persuade the customer to buy the offering.

Marketing stands on four pillars, and these pillars give way to marketing’s core functions too – analysis, planning and communication.

• Developing an offering that the market needs
• Pricing the offering by predicting the perfect balance of product value and the customer’s paying capacity, to maximise profits.
• Using the right distribution channels to distribute the offering
• Communicate about the brand, brand message, offering, and offering’s USP to increase sales. (Source: feedtought.com)

Nature of Marketing

Although marketing focuses on a particular goal, it takes a 360-degree approach to achieve it.

• Managerial Function: Marketing is a process by which officials ensure that product, place, and price of a business are managed in a holistic way.
• The purpose of marketing is to achieve profit and to build a sustainable business.
• Marketing is a social process that results in the parties obtaining what they need through the creation and exchange of values and offerings.
• Customer-Oriented: Marketing aims to satisfy the needs, wants, and demands of the customer and make a profit as a result.
• Marketing is both art and science, as it requires marketers to understand customer behavior and to utilize this knowledge along with skills to generate demand for the offering.
• Marketing revolves around aligning the business’ goals with the customers’ goals through interaction with the audience.
• Marketing involves marketing professionals actively interacting with the public throughout the marketing process.

Types of marketing scope based on entities marketer

People often confuse types of marketing strategies with types of marketing. They are different in so many ways-

A marketing strategy focuses on the ‘how’ of marketing – how an offering is marketed. A marketing strategy focuses on the ‘what’ of marketing – what is marketed.

Marketing isn’t limited to just physical goods. Today, even human, places, and experiences are marketed.

• Products are tangible offerings manufactured in bulk and require marketing to reach the right client at the right time. Examples include mobile phones, televisions, etc.
• Service Marketing: Intangible activities that are impossible to separate by the provider, such as hotels, airlines, barbershops, etc.
• Time based events like trade shows, artistic performances, etc.
• Experience Marketing: An orchestrated mix of services and goods that results in an experience. For example, an amusement park experience, an international holiday experience, etc.
• Example – Ronaldo, Michael Jackson, etc. Person Marketing: Individuals known for their skills, professions, arts, etc.
• Place Marketing: Places, cities, states, and countries aimed at attracting investors and/or tourists. Example – Hawaii.
• Organization Marketing: Corporations and not-for-profit organizations such as schools, colleges, universities, NGOs, etc.
• Property Marketing: Intangible properties such as real estate, stocks, securities, and deeds.
• Marketing of information: Information obtained through books, schools, universities, websites, media houses, etc. and related to healthcare, technology, science, media, law, tax, markets, finance, accounting, etc.
• Marketing of ideas: The processes by which ideas are developed into products, companies, etc.

Scope of marketing

Marketing’s scope seems to be wider in comparison with other business functions. It is present at all stages of a customer’s buying cycle and integrates into almost all business activities.

Even a separate type of marketing, known as digital marketing, has evolved to expand the scope of marketing over the internet.

• Planning and developing the product offering based on what the market needs.
• Market Research: Researching consumer demands and consumer behavior. Product Development: Creating a product that meets market demands.
• A product’s price should be set based on its value and the buyer’s ability to pay so that profit margins can be maximized.
• A product’s distribution should enable the offering to reach customers wherever and whenever they need it.
• In the promotional process, the goal is to create demand.
• In the sales process, incentives are offered to increase sales.
• After-Sales: Maintaining a good brand image in the marketplace through after-sales support.