The following core set of concepts is vital for marketing functions:
(1) Needs, Wants, and Demands
Our society shapes our wants. Needs are the basic human requirements such as air, food, water, clothing, and shelter. Demands are wants for specific products backed by an ability to pay or purchase power. Marketers do not create needs: Needs pre-exist marketers. Marketers might promote the idea that a BMW satisfies a person’s need for social status. They do not, however, create the need for social status.
There are five types of needs:
1. Stated needs (The customer wants a tablet.)
2. Real needs (The customer wants a tablet whose operating cost, not initial price, is low.)
3. Unstated needs (The customer expects good service from the shop/dealer.)
4. Delight needs (The customer wants the dealer to include a more robust operating system.)
5. Secret needs (The customer wants friends to see him or her as a savvy consumer.)
Consumers did not know much about tablet computers when they were first introduced, but Apple worked hard to shape consumer perceptions of them. To gain an edge, companies must help customers learn what they want. Responding only to the stated need may short-change the customer.
(2) Target Markets, Positioning, and Segmentation
Marketers need to identify distinct segments of buyers by identifying demographic, psychographic, and behavioral differences between them (i.e., segmentation). They then decide which component (s) present the most significant opportunities (i.e., targeting). For each target market, the firm develops a market offering that it positions in target buyers’ minds as delivering some key benefit(s) (i.e., setting). Volvo serves buyers to whom safety is a significant concern, placing them as the safest a customer can buy.
(3) Offerings and Brands
Consumers’ needs and wants are fulfilled through market offerings—some combination of products, services, information, or experiences offered to a market to satisfy a need or a desire. A brand is an offering from a known source. A brand name such as Apple carries many different kinds of associations in people’s minds that make up its image: creative, innovative, easy-to-use, fun, relaxed, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, to name just a few. All companies strive to build a brand image with as many strong, favorable, and unique brand associations possible.
(4) Marketing Channels
The marketer uses three kinds of marketing channels to reach a target market. Marketers use communication channels to deliver and receive messages from target markets. These channels include newspapers, magazines, radio, television, smartphone, billboards, and the Internet. In addition, direct and indirect distribution channels make the product or service(s) available to the buyer or user. These channels include the Internet, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, and agents as intermediaries.
(5) Paid, Owned, and Earned Media
Marketers can group their communication channels into three categories. (a) Paid media include TV, magazine, and display ads, which allow marketers to show their ad or brand for a fee. (b) Owned media are communication channels marketers own, like a company or brand brochure, Web site, Facebook and Instagram page, or Twitter account. (c) Earned media are streams in which consumers, the press, or other outsiders voluntarily communicate something about the brand via word of mouth, buzz, or viral marketing methods.
(6) Impressions and Engagement
Impressions are a valuable metric for tracking the scope or breadth of a communication’s reach that can also be compared across all communication types. However, impressions don’t provide any insight into the results of viewing the contact.
Engagement is the extent of a customer’s attention and active involvement with a communication. It reflects a much more dynamic response than a mere impression and is more likely to create value for the firm. Some online measures of engagements are Facebook “likes,” Twitter tweets, comments on a Web site, and sharing of video or other content. Engagement can extend to personal experiences that augment or transform a firm’s products and services.
(7) Value and Satisfaction
The buyer chooses the offerings that deliver the most value, the sum of the tangible and intangible benefits and costs. Value primarily combinates the quality, service, and price. Value perceptions increase with quality and service but decrease with a price. Thus, marketing includes activities on identifying, creating, communicating, delivering, and monitoring customer value.
Satisfaction reflects a person’s judgment of a product’s perceived performance in relation to expectations. If performance falls short of expectations, the customer is disappointed. If it matches expectations, the customer is satisfied. If it exceeds them, the customer is delighted.
(8) Supply Chain
The supply chain stretches from raw materials to components to finished products carried to final buyers. Value can be generated by managing the supply chain’s value delivery system, including expanding the upstream or downstream channel to capture a higher percentage of supply chain value.
(9) Competition
The competition includes all the actual and potential rival offerings and substitutes a buyer might consider. The design and technology for a new smart TV can come from a foreign firm in Japan or Korea, the electronic chips can buy from Malaysia. The assembly can be done in Vietnam or China. The competition of Samsung TV in Malaysia is from other TV brands and the sources of materials and labor from other countries.
(10) Marketing Environment
The marketing environment consists of the task environment and the broad environment. The task environment includes the actors engaged in producing, distributing, and promoting the offering. These are the company, suppliers, distributors, dealers, target customers, and other supporting agencies such as marketing research agencies, advertising agencies, banking and insurance companies, transportation companies, and telecommunications companies.
The broad environment consists of six components: demographic environment, economic environment, social-cultural environment, natural environment, technological environment, and political-legal environment. New opportunities and threats are constantly emerging due to the changes in this environment for The trends and developments in these forces may affect the marketing strategies.es.