Marketing is the company function charged with defining customer targets and the best way to satisfy their needs and wants competitively and profitably. Since consumers and business buyers face an abundance of suppliers seeking to satisfy their every need, companies cannot survive today by simply doing a good job. They must do an excellent job if they are to remain in the increasingly competitive global marketplace. Recent studies have demonstrated that the key to profitable company performance is knowing and satisfying target customers with competitively superior offers. This process takes place today in an increasingly global, technical and competitive environment

Marketing has its origins in the fact that humans have needs and wants. Needs and wants create a state of discomfort in people, which is relieved through acquiring products to satisfy these needs and wants. Since many products can satisfy a given need, product choice is guided by the concepts of value, cost, and satisfaction. These products are obtainable in several ways: self-production, coercion, begging and exchange. Most modern societies work on the principle of exchange, which means that people specialize in producing particular products and trade them for the other things they need. They engage in transactions and relationship-building. A market is a group of people who share a similar need. Marketing encompasses those activities that represent working with markets and attempting to actualize potential exchanges.

Marketing management is the conscious effort to achieve desired exchange outcomes with target markets. The marketer's basic skill lies in influencing the level, timing, and composition of demand for a product, service, organization, place, person, idea or some form of information.

There are five alternative philosophies that can guide organizations in their efforts to carry out their marketing goal(s). The production concept holds that consumers will favor products that are affordable and available, and therefore management's major task is to improve production and distribution efficiency and bring down prices. The product concept holds that consumers favor quality products that are reasonably priced, and therefore little promotional effort is required. The selling concept holds that consumers will not buy enough of the company's products unless they are stimulated through a substantial selling and promotion effort.

Heading towards more enlightened views of the role of marketing, the marketing concept holds that the main task of the company is to determine the needs, wants, and preferences of a target group of customers and to deliver the desired satisfactions. Its four principles are target market, customer needs, integrated marketing, and profitability. The marketing concept places primary focus on the needs and wants of customers who comprise the target market for a particular product. Rather than coax customers into purchasing a product they may not find satisfying, the emphasis is on determining the types of markets to be satisfied, and creating the product that achieves this satisfaction objective. Choosing target markets and identifying customer needs is no small task; a marketer must dig beyond a customer’s stated needs. Once this is accomplished, a marketer can offer for sale the products that will lead to the highest satisfaction. This encourages customer retention and profit, which is best achieved when all areas/departments of a company become "customer-focused".

Moving beyond the marketing concept, the societal marketing concept holds that the main task of the company is to generate customer satisfaction and long-run consumer and societal well-being as the key to satisfying organizational goals and responsibilities.

Interest in marketing is intensifying as more organizations in the business sector, the nonprofit sector, and the global sector recognize how marketing contributes to improved performance in the marketplace. The result is that marketers are re-evaluating various marketing concepts and tools focus on relationships, databases, communications and channels of distribution, as well as marketing outside and inside the organization.

• Know why marketing is important to contemporary organizations
• Understand the core concepts of marketing
• Know the basic tasks performed by marketing organizations and managers
• Understand the differences between the various orientations to the marketplace
• Know the components of the marketing concept and why they are critical to successful marketing practice
• Know why marketing has been found to be critical to different types of organizations and in different environments.

1. Introduction --- Importance of Marketing in Contemporary Organizations - with rapid changes come both challenges and opportunities, marketing allows organizations to take advantage of these opportunities
2. Marketing Tasks
1. Scope of Marketing -- Involves a broadened View of Marketing - to types of entities (goods, services, and ideas)
1. Products are anything offered for sale or exchange that satisfies a need or want.
2. Products can be goods, services, ideas -- and also people, places, activities, organizations and information.
2. A Broadened View of Marketing Tasks - Decisions Marketers Make -
1. Consumer Markets and Business Markets - Each requires new tools and capabilities to better understand and respond to the customer.
2. Global Markets, Nonprofit and Governmental Markets - Becoming more sophisticated in recognizing and dealing with marketing challenges and decisions.
3. Marketing Concepts and Tools
1. Defining Marketing
1. Marketing Defined - a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering, and exchanging products of value with others.
2. Core Marketing Concepts
1. Target Markets and Segmentation - Every product or service contains features which a marketer must translate into benefits for a target market. It is these benefits the consumer perceives to be available in a product and directly impacts the perceived ability to meet the consumer need(s) or want(s).
2. Marketers and Prospects - a marketer is someone actively seeking one or more prospects for an exchange of values. A prospect has been identified as willing and able to engage in the exchange.
3. Needs, Wants, and Demands - to need is to be in a state of felt deprivation of some basic satisfaction. Wants are desires for specific satisfiers of needs. Demands are wants for specific products that are backed by an ability and willingness to buy them.
4. Product or offering - Anything offered for sale that satisfies a need or want. Products consist of three primary components: goods, services and ideas. The physical product provides the desired service or action.
5. Value and Satisfaction - Value is the consumer’s estimate of the product’s overall capacity to satisfy his or her needs determined according to the lowest possible cost of acquisition, ownership and use.
6. Exchange and Transactions - exchange means obtaining a desired product by offering something desirable in return. Five conditions must be satisfied (p.11) A transaction is the trade of values (involves several dimensions).
7. Relationships and Networks - Relationship marketing seeks long-term, "win-win" transactions between marketers and key parties (suppliers, customers, distributors) The ultimate outcome of relationship marketing is a unique company asset called a marketing network of mutually profitable business relationships.
8. Marketing Channels - Reaching the target market is critical. To do this the marketer can use two-way communication channels (media- newspapers through the Internet), versus more traditional means. The marketer also must decide on the distribution channel, trade channels and selling channels (to effect transactions).
9. Supply chain - the long channel process that reaches from the raw materials and components to the final product / buyers. Perceived as a value delivery system.
10. Competition - Includes actual and potential rival offerings and substitutes. A broad view of competition assists the marketer to recognize the levels of competition, based on substitutability: brand, industry, form and generic.
11. Marketing Environment - Includes the task (immediate actors in the production, distribution and promotional environments) and the broad environments (demographic, economic, natural, technological, political-legal and social-cultural).
12. Marketing Mix - the set of marketing tools the firm uses to pursue marketing objectives with the target market. Involves recognition and use of the four Ps and the four Cs in the short run and the long run.
4. Company Orientations Toward the Marketplace
1. The Production Concept - Assumes consumers will favor those products that are widely available and low in cost.
2. The Product Concept - Assumes consumers will favor those products that offer the best combination of quality, performance, or innovative features.
3. The Selling Concept - Assumes organizations must undertake aggressive selling and promotion efforts to enact exchanges with otherwise passive consumers.
4. The Marketing Concept _- Assumes:
1. The key to achieving organizational goals consists of being more effective than competitors in integrating marketing activities toward determining and satisfying the needs and wants of target markets.
2. Target Market - no company can operate in every market and satisfy every need.
3. Customer Needs - it’s not enough to just find the market; marketers must also understand their customer's needs and wants. This is not a simple task.
4. Integrated Marketing - all of a company’s departments must work together to serve the customer’s interests. This begins among the various marketing functions and carries out into other departments.
5. Profitability - the ultimate purpose of marketing is to help organizations achieve profitability goals.
6. Hurdles to Adopting a Marketing Concept
1. Organized Resistance - some departments see marketing as a threat to their power in the organization
2. Slow Learning - despite efforts by management, learning comes slow
3. Fast Forgetting - there is a strong tendency to forget marketing principles
7. Profitability
5. The Societal Marketing Concept
1. Societal Marketing Concept - the organization’s task is to determine the needs, wants, and interests of target markets and to deliver the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than competitors in a way that preserves or enhances the consumer’s and the society’s well-being.
5. How Business and Marketing are Changing
1. Company Responses and Adjustments - the focus here is on reengineering the firm, outsourcing goods and services, e-commerce, benchmarking, alliances (networking), partner-suppliers, market-centered (versus product centered), local and global marketing (versus only local), and decentralization to encourage innovative thinking and marketing.
2. Marketer Responses and Adjustments - Focus on relationship marketing (versus transactional marketing), creation of customer lifetime value orientation, focus on customer share marketing versus only market share, target marketing (versus mass marketing), individualization of marketing messages and offerings, customer databases for data-mining, integrated marketing communications for consistent images, consideration of channel members as partners, recognition of every employee as a marketer, and model and fact-based decision making versus intuition alone.
6. Summary