Marketing Best Practices

What is Marketing?

Marketing is the discipline that enables the needs of a target market to be addressed at a profit by exploring, creating and delivering adequate value. The science of Marketing is to identify qualitatively and quantitatively the needs that remain unfulfilled or latent and to promote the right service or product to the identified target segment.

Marketing while in most cases performed by internal teams, it can also be conducted by external teams within an organization. Marketing is not only operational at a local level in an organization, it is also transversal and conducted in a strategic manner considering its potential financial and brand reputation impact.

In his “Marketing Management” book, Dr. Philip Kotler identifies some key concepts which make up the vocabulary used today by marketing professionals: “segmentation, targeting, positioning, needs, wants, demand, offerings, brands, value and satisfaction, exchange, transactions, relationships and networks, marketing channels, supply chain, competition, the marketing environment, and marketing programs.

More on Marketing by Dr. Philip Kotler here

Why is Marketing useful for organizations?

In essence, the top level mission of Marketing is to help organizations deliver services and products which help people reach a higher standard of living and quality of life. Therefore, for an organization, it is about finding a maximum number of globally profitable ways and processes to help people become aware of products or services the organization has to offer and that could fulfill unmet needs. The bottom line being more turnover on profitable services and products and giving more financial means for the organization to reinvest in new offers or compensate shareholders.

Again, according to Dr. Philip Kotler, Marketing processes in organizations can be divided into multiple processes:

• 1) Opportunity Identification

• 2) New Product Development

• 3) Customer Attraction

• 4) Customer Retention and loyalty building

• 5) Order Fulfilment

It is the successful management and operational application of all of these processes that will make an organization’s marketing strategy successful.