Marketing and Marketing Management: A First Basic Understanding

Abstract

Many people think of marketing as only sales and advertising! Every day we are bombarded with TV commercials, flyers, catalogues, sales calls, and commercial e-mail. However, selling and advertising are only one element of marketing. Today, marketing must be understood not in the old sense of making a sale but in a contemporary and holistic sense of satisfying customer needs. Marketing guru Philip Kotler defines marketing as societal and managerial process by which individuals and organizations obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging value with others. While marketing originally concentrated on physical goods (especially consumer goods), today many more types of ‘goods’ are marketed. Marketers market ten main types of entities: goods, services, events, experiences, persons, places, properties, organizations, information, ideas. A company has to decide which philosophy should guide their marketing efforts. There are five alternative concepts: the production concept, the product concept, the selling concept, the marketing concept and the relationship marketing concept. The concept of internal marketing is of key importance: it refers to the managerial actions necessary to make all members of the organization understand and accept their individual roles in implementing marketing strategy.