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Marketing is an integrated communications-based process through which individuals and communities discover that existing and newly-identified needs and wants may be satisfied by the products and services of others.

Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as 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. The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market, as in shopping, or going to a market to buy or sell goods or services.

Marketing practice tends to be seen as a creative industry, which includes advertising, distribution and selling. It is also concerned with anticipating the customers' future needs and wants, which are often discovered through market research. Seen from a systems point of view, sales process engineering views marketing as a set of processes that are interconnected and interdependent with other functions, whose methods can be improved using a variety of relatively new approaches.

Marketing is influenced by many of the social sciences, particularly psychology, sociology, and economics. Anthropology and neuroscience are also small but growing influences. Market research underpins these activities through advertising, it is also related to many of the creative arts. The marketing literature is also infamous for re-inventing itself and its vocabulary according to the times and the culture.

Four Ps

Main article: Marketing mix

In the early 1960s, Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services. Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a “Marketing Mix”. Professor E. Jerome McCarthy, also at the Harvard Business School in the early 1960s, suggested that the Marketing Mix contained 4 elements: product, price, place and promotion.

• Product : The product aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual goods or services, and how it relates to the end-user's needs and wants. The scope of a product generally includes supporting elements such as warranties, guarantees, and support.
• Pricing : This refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including discounts. The price need not be monetary; it can simply be what is exchanged for the product or services, e.g. time, energy, or attention. Methods of setting prices optimally are in the domain of pricing science.
• Placement (or distribution): refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point-of-sale placement or retailing. This third P has also sometimes been called Place , referring to the channel by which a product or service is sold (e.g. online vs. retail), which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young adults, families, business people), etc. also referring to how the environment in which the product is sold in can affect sales.
• Promotion : This includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling. Branding refers to the various methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.

These four elements are often referred to as the marketing mix, which a marketer can use to craft a marketing plan.

The four Ps model is most useful when marketing low value consumer products. Industrial products, services, high value consumer products require adjustments to this model. Services marketing must account for the unique nature of services.

Industrial or B2B marketing must account for the long term contractual agreements that are typical in supply chain transactions. Relationship marketing attempts to do this by looking at marketing from a long term relationship perspective rather than individual transactions.

As a counter to this, Morgan, in Riding the Waves of Change (Jossey-Bass, 1988), suggests that one of the greatest limitations of the 4 Ps approach "is that it unconsciously emphasizes the inside–out view (looking from the company outwards), whereas the essence of marketing should be the outside–in approach".

Product

Main article: New Product Development

Branding

Main article: Brand

A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or other feature that distinguishes products and services from competitive offerings. A brand represents the consumers' experience with an organization, product, or service. A brand is more than a name, design or symbol. Brand reflects personality of the company which is organizational culture.

A brand has also been defined as an identifiable entity that makes a specific value based on promises made and kept either actively or passively.

Branding means creating reference of certain products in mind.

Co-branding involves marketing activity involving two or more products.

Marketing communications

Marketing communications breaks down the strategies involved with marketing messages into categories based on the goals of each message. There are distinct stages in converting strangers to customers that govern the communication medium that should be used.

Advertising

• Paid form of public presentation and expressive promotion of ideas
• Aimed at masses
• Manufacturer may determine what goes into advertisement
• Pervasive and impersonal medium

Functions and advantages of successful advertising

1. Task of the salesman made easier

• Maximize sales
• Publicity
• Brand building
• Create awareness
• Persuade buyers
• Introduction of new product
• Enable market leadership
• To face competition
• To inform changes
• To counteract to competitors advertisement
• To enhance goodwill

Objectives

• Maintain demand for well-known goods
• Introduce new and unknown goods
• Increase demand for well-known goods/products/services

Requirements of a good advertisement

The AIDA principle. Attention, Interest, Desire and Action

• Attract attention (awareness)
• Stimulate interest
• Create a desire
• Bring about action (to buy the product)

Eight steps in an advertising campaign

• Market research
• Setting out aims
• Budgeting
• Choice of media (television, newspaper/magazines, radio, web, outdoor)
• Choice of actors and players (New Trend)
• Design and wording
• Co-ordination
• Test results

Personal sales

Oral presentation given by a salesperson who approaches individuals or a group of potential customers:

• Live, interactive relationship
• Personal interest
• Attention and response
• Interesting presentation
• Clear and thorough.

Sales promotion

Short-term incentives to encourage buying of products:

• Instant appeal
• Anxiety to sell

An example is coupons or a sale. People are given an incentive to buy, but this does not build customer loyalty or encourage future repeat buys. A major drawback of sales promotion is that it is easily copied by competition. It cannot be used as a sustainable source of differentiation.

Marketing Public Relations (MPR)

• Stimulation of demand through press release giving a favourable report to a product
• Higher degree of credibility
• Effectively news
• Boosts enterprise's image

Customer focus

Many companies today have a customer focus (or market orientation). This implies that the company focuses its activities and products on consumer demands. Generally there are three ways of doing this: the customer-driven approach, the sense of identifying market changes and the product innovation approach.

In the consumer-driven approach, consumer wants are the drivers of all strategic marketing decisions. No strategy is pursued until it passes the test of consumer research. Every aspect of a market offering, including the nature of the product itself, is driven by the needs of potential consumers. The starting point is always the consumer. The rationale for this approach is that there is no point spending R&D funds developing products that people will not buy. History attests to many products that were commercial failures in spite of being technological breakthroughs.

A formal approach to this customer-focused marketing is known as SIVA (Solution, Information, Value, Access). This system is basically the four Ps renamed and reworded to provide a customer focus.

The SIVA Model provides a demand/customer centric version alternative to the well-known 4Ps supply side model (product, price, place, promotion) of marketing management.

The four elements of the SIVA model are:

1. Solution: How appropriate is the solution to the customer's problem/need?
2. Information: Does the customer know about the solution? If so, how and from whom do they know enough to let them make a buying decision?
3. Value: Does the customer know the v