What is Marketing?

Before you learn more about marketing within the many links afterward below topic, you ought to first understand what marketing is, because the subject is so often misunderstood. Marketing is the wide selection of activities involved in ensuring that you're continuing to satisfy the requirements of your customers and are becoming appropriate value reciprocally.

How Marketing is So Misunderstood

Far too often, organizations attempt to develop a product to satisfy customers’ needs without ever really verifying what the purchasers wanted in the first place. Instead, those organizations make a strenuous effort to “sell” the merchandise through rigorous, ongoing advertising, promotions, and publicity -- through "outbound" marketing. These organizations may have built a gorgeous ladder – but it's going to be entirely on the incorrect roof! Far too often, that lesson comes from painful experiences.

Experienced organizations have learned that it's not their opinion that matters most regarding whether their product is required or not. The opinion that matters most is that of the purchasers. These organizations have learned that they could not know what they do not realize about their customers. That precious knowledge about the purchasers comes from "inbound" marketing -- through marketing research to clarify customers' needs and what they're willing to try to urge those needs met. If the inbound marketing is completed well, the outbound marketing is especially easy -- and effective.

Inbound Marketing Includes marketing research to seek out Out:

• What specific groups of potential customers/clients (markets) may need which specific needs (nonprofits often have already got a really clear community need in mind when starting out with a replacement program -- however, the emerging practice of nonprofit business development, or earned income development, often starts by researching a broad group of clients to spot new opportunities for programs)
• How those needs could be met for every group (or target market), which suggests how a product could be designed to satisfy the necessity (nonprofits might think in terms of outcomes, or changes, to accomplish among the groups of clients so as to satisfy the needs)
• How each of the target markets might prefer to access the merchandise, etc. (its "packaging")
• what proportion of the customers/clients could be willing to pay and the way (pricing analysis)
• Who the competitors are (competitor analysis)
• the way to design and describe the merchandise such customers/clients will buy from the organization, instead of from its competitors (its unique value proposition)
• How the merchandise should be identified -- its personality -- to be most identifiable (its naming and branding)

Outbound Marketing Includes:

• Advertising and promotions (focused on the product)
• Sales
• Public and media relations (focused on the whole organization)
• Customer service
• Customer satisfaction