Thesis
This paper is on the topic of principles of marketing and importance in various organizations. The paper will discuss how marketing is important in the organizational structure and hierarchy. Also, the discussion will cover several examples of importance of marketing in organizations. Finally, the paper will discuss the level of importance of marketing needs to be higher.
Introduction
At present, no business in this world can ignore the relevance of marketing. Either a large, small or non-profit organization or an industrial product manufacturer, marketing is the need of everyone. Every company’s financial success depends largely on their prudent marketing efforts along with their operational, financial, accounting and other functions.
The reason for marketing being relevant to the financial success of a company can be answered by supposing that a company has a great product to offer that has excellent features, amazing packaging and best quality but no one will know about the product. Without marketing there won’t be any demand in the market for the product; company would make fail in selling and eventually have no profit. The most relevant function of marketing is that it creates awareness about products/services and helps in making loyal customers. Through marketing consumers get opportunity to get aware of the product on offer and firms get opportunity to convince customers to purchase their products/services.
With highly competitive market an organization is not the only one that offers a product or service. An intelligent marketing campaign is significant to an organization for helping them communicate how their product is different from other competitors, what is better in your product in comparison to your competitors and why customers spend their money on purchasing their product instead of competitors in market. Marketing enables organizations to capture the maximum market share, make their brand name, develop loyal customers and retain them for long-term. The core of success for every business lies in their marketing. All the relevant aspects of businesses depend on the successful marketing. The marketing umbrella covers aspects of promotions, advertising, public relations and sales. Marketing is the process with which a product/service gets introduced and promoted to their potential customers. Without the tool of marketing every business can offer the best products/ services in their industry but no potential customers would be aware about it. Without effective marketing sales can crash and any company would have to shut their operations.
In various organisations, marketing is given a different level of importance in the organisational structure and hierarchy?
Today’s many successful companies have something in common, they are highly customer focused and committed to marketing efforts. These companies are passionate for satisfying and understanding the customer needs in their well-defined target markets. They keep motivating everyone in their organization for helping to build lasting customer relations based on value creation. These customer relationships are highly important today’s business environment. As the United States economy recovered from its worst situation since the Great Depression, highly frugal customers are spending after careful detail and reassessing their relations with popular brands. In turn, it is becoming more important for brands to build stronger customer relationships that have real and enduring value. Marketing is the function that deals with customers or is related to customers. The twofold marketing goal is attracting new customers with promise of superior value, keeping and growing present customers with delivering satisfaction (Kotler & Armstrong, 2011, p. 2-4).
Marketing is the function responsible for more than just sales and the responsibilities differs depending on its level of strategy and organization. It is also the management function that is responsible for ensuring that each aspect of the business focuses on delivery of superior value to its customers in a highly competitive marketplace. Businesses are increasingly likely to become a strategic partnerships network among designers, distributors, technology providers, manufacturers and information specialists. Businesses can be defined by nature of its customers, not by their products, factories and offices. Marketing as the distinct management function would be responsible to keep the rest of the network organization aware about the customers and being expert on the customer. At the business and corporate unit levels, marketing can merge with the strategic planning or more generally, strategy development function, with the shared responsibility for the information management, coordination of the network activities and environmental scanning.
Marketing is no longer treated as the responsibility of specialists in an organization. Rather, every member of the firm should be charged with the responsibility to understand customers and for contributing to development and delivering value. Marketing must be part of all employees’ job description and should be included in the organization culture. Organization culture needs to be focused on the customer and will be seen increasingly as the key strategic resource that defines uniqueness of network organization and coordinating their several parts towards the common objectives and mission. Firms that are unable to achieve this focus on the customer will either disappear or become highly specialized players, taking strategic direction from others, in a network organization. Customer focus may need increasingly huge investments in information technology that gives some advantages to the firms that are large enough for making pre-emptive investments.
Some Examples are: Walmart becoming the largest retailer in the world and the largest company in the world by delivering their promise of “Save money. Live better”.
Nintendo has surged ahead in the market of video-games behind their pledge of “Wii would like to play”, backed by their highly popular Wii console and their growing list of games and accessories for customers of all ages. McDonald’s fulfilling their “i’m lovin’ it” motto by being the customers’ favorite joint and way to eat all over the world, giving them the market share higher than that of their nearest 3 competitors combined. Sound marketing is crucial to the organizational success and this leads to large for-profit firms like Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Google, Target and Marriott using marketing aggressively. Just like any not-for-profit organizations like colleges, symphony orchestras, hospitals, museums and even churches.
Why do you think this difference occurs?
Marketing is a highly important concept in all businesses and one that many business functions get affected with on regular basis. Importance of marketing is increasing in regular basis. Marketing is probably the most crucial component for determination of business’ success and profitability. Functions that can illustrate the relevance of marketing in every business are:
Customer
Customers’ wants, needs and demands are rightly what every business caters to and how well these businesses capture attention of customers through marketing their products and services affects how customers spend their money. Without any promotion, customers are unaware what a business is offering them.
Finance
The more properly marketed a business is, the more financially stable and successful it will be over a period of time. Finance gets affected with how many goods and services a business produces, since the supplies for manufacturing cost, labour and money. However, without proper marketing, every business would have trouble in selling their products even if they have the finances for their production.
Human Resources
Every business requires human resources for serving as employees, managers, labour and obviously marketers. Human resources are used by every business for making their products and providing services. Yet, every business can have their plethora of human resources, but without marketing it is impossible for them to capture any customers, the goods/services would not sell and their business won’t flourish. Human resources are dependent of marketing to do its job and get results.
Production
The more products one business manufactures, the more goods they need to sell and the more potential earnings they can make, it is all related with each other. Business can have its warehouse full of company products, but without any marketing to promote and sell them, it is just a profitless inventory.
Competition
As specific goods and services start to become popular, more businesses enter the industry and start offering them, leading to increase in competition. Marketing helps in making businesses stand out so that customers prefer buying from them rather than from the businesses that sell and market the similar goods and services.
Marketing is probably the most crucial function or activity as it is directly related to the effect on the business profitability and sales. Larger businesses dedicate their specific staff and sometimes departments for their marketing purposes and efforts. It is relevant to realise that it is not possible to carry out marketing in isolation from the remaining functions of the business. Example: Marketing department of a business has to work closely with its operation, finance, research and development and human resources for checking if all their plans are possible to run. Operations would need to implement sales forecasts by producing the marketing department their plan for production schedules. Sales forecasts would also be important part of budgets that are produced by the finance team/department, in addition to the labour deployment for the human resources department. Research and development department would require working very closely with their marketing department for understanding the customer needs and testing the outputs of the Research & Development section (Kotler, 2012, p. 21-88).
Why do you think that the level of importance of marketing should always be higher, discuss with examples?
Marketing is an investment for the future sales. For every business, the target is to look for the future and towards the next sale. Customers should be aware about the company and the products on offer. This is where marketing comes into play; marketing is the tool that helps in gaining the customer through successful promotion, advertising and among other ways to gain those customers. Keeping in mind the 4 P’s of marketing—product, promotion, price and place. These elements need to work together for generating the consumer interest and triggering the buying response in the audience. Marketing manager needs to take judicious decisions regarding their 4 P’s: (i) Product (decisions regarding the new product development, branding, packaging etc.); (ii) Physical distribution (decisions regarding marketing channels, policies and procedures relating to transportation, warehousing, etc.); (iii) Promotion (this involving salesmanship, advertising, sales promotion, and publicity); and (iv) Pricing (procedures and policies that relate to setting up profitable prices).
Since marketing is supposed to consumer-oriented, it has positive impact on business firms. It also enables the businesses to improve the quality of goods and services. Marketing helps in improvement of the people’s standard of living by offering wide variety of goods and services along with freedom of choice and by treating their customer as most important in their business. Marketing also generates employment for production and in distribution areas. Since business firms generate revenue and earn profits after them carryout marketing functions, it would engage in exploiting the economic resources to earn greater profits. A large scale firm can have their own formal marketing network, sales force and media campaigns, but small unit might have to depend fully on personal resources and efforts, making it flexible and informal. Marketing is the function that either makes or breaks any enterprise. Marketing is the process for getting goods and services in the customer’s hands with a view of satisfying the desires and needs of producers and consumers. In other words, marketing function creates the process through which consumers and producers come together for a relationship of exchange and ownership transfer takes place (Kotler & Armstrong, 2011, p. 2-24).
Conclusion
Marketing is the most important aspect of increasing any business and it is an investment that pays for itself multiple times. Yet marketing function is often misunderstood, and even neglected due to a lack of resources, time or knowledge of potential. Creative, clever, insightful and flexible marketing strategy can unlock immense potential for any business. The reason for marketing being so important is that it teaches businesses how you get new customers and retain older ones. Clearly no one is comes into a shop or store and asks for whatever the products on sale, it requires one or more any forms of marketing. Marketing in one way or another makes sure that a firm ends up are selling or at least creating leads that can be turned into sales.
Reference List
Kotler, P, and G. Armstrong. (2011). Principles of Marketing. 14th ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2-155.
Kotler,P., Armstrong, G.M., Adam, S. & Denize S. (2012). Principles of Marketing. 5th ed. Sydney: Pearson Publication. 12-100.
