Marketing is a word with a long history, and it expresses a fuller, broader and more complex art and science than many realize.
Marketing has been the key to the success of all kinds of businesses through the ages. It's the secret blend the corporate world craves to understand and apply its components.
In fact, we all practice marketing in one way or another every day, not only in business, but also in our personal lives.
What is Marketing
Marketing stands for Marketing in English, and it is a process that begins with the visualization and planning of products and services, the implementation of this perception, the intelligent pricing of the product or service, its distribution and its placement in the right place. in front of the right customer, and promoting that in any way possible. And in the end achieve the ultimate goal of getting more profits for individuals and organizations. We can therefore conclude that marketing is more than just tactics carried out by marketing managers.
Professional marketing is also based on analysis, which is a very important element, and it is the basis on which intelligent marketing strategies are based. But what type of analytics is used in marketing operations? It is the analysis of the customer and the understanding of his behaviors, desires, motivations and preferences, and the collection of all the data and information concerning him, and it is also the analysis of the market, its size and its circumstances. particular, and the size of the competition in it.
And in the end, use this analysis to work on the product, choose its price, determine its distribution areas, and create advertising campaigns to achieve the best level of sales and then profits.
Marketing can also be defined briefly as: a set of processes and activities that work to discover the desires of the customer, and develop products that satisfy the desires of the customer on the one hand, and on the other hand achieve the goal of the organization, which is profit.
Many people know marketing as the art of selling, but in fact, sales is part of the marketing process. Marketing has other dimensions, from a social point of view, for example, marketing is the main link between the material needs of society, and the response to the economic patterns followed, through the supply of a product or of service to the community and the satisfaction of desires. .
We can also call the concept of marketing the process of defining the target market, segmenting it, analyzing it, understanding customer trends and delivering high value to them.
Several conditions must be met to manage a successful marketing process, which is to have a clear idea of marketing and a professional understanding of its dimensions, to work on long-term plans based on building a strong brand and to achieve continuous growth. for the institution or project.
A brief history of marketing
Marketing is as old as civilizations themselves. You may have watched historical films of a certain era, and seen scenes of markets and commerce active at that time. Merchants have used the principles of marketing since ancient times, displaying goods in large markets where the public is interested in buying those goods and products.
The public goes to the markets, chooses the merchant they judge the best and buys to satisfy their material needs. Of course, these merchants did not name their business activities, but relied solely on the good presentation of their products to attract customers to buy the offered product.
As for the concept of marketing, which we currently see in its developed form, it actually only began as a result of a series of developments that began in the 18th and 19th centuries through the industrial revolutions.
This era saw many great changes at the industrial and commercial level, which in turn led to great societal changes. The first results of this era were the separation of production from consumption, and the mass production at this time and the development of transport infrastructure and emerging and growing media forced producers and manufacturers to develop methods more complex to manage the distribution of the goods produced. .
We can divide the development stages of the marketing process into three stages, each stage had a predominant basic orientation, namely:
- More production to meet demand
In the early industrial revolutions, goods were generally scarce, and manufacturers and producers could sell almost anything they could produce as long as consumers could buy. Therefore, they focused on increasing production and worked on managing product distribution at the lowest possible cost.
At that time, the biggest concerns for factory owners and growers were how to produce the largest quantities, and as quickly as possible, in order to benefit from this huge demand for their products.
At that time, manufacturers or inventors did not usually ask... what exactly did the customer need and how satisfied they were with the goods. On the contrary, manufacturers and inventors had the upper hand and the first and last word in their dealings with the market and consumers.
- Orientation towards more sales
The focus on marketing has shifted to making more sales. Around this time, communications, advertising, and branding began to become more important as companies wanted to sell growing products in an increasingly crowded market.
Although marketing at this time was still associated with production, it focused on distribution, communication, and persuading customers that the goods produced by a particular firm were better than others.
As the market expanded, monopolistic policies began to disappear: for example, Ford was no longer the only car manufacturer, but new competitors such as General Motors emerged. This led to an increase in supply in the general market and then to a decrease in sales.
From there, companies realized that they had to put more importance on the consumer, so companies are turning to a new type of human resources who have negotiation and persuasive skills.
Organizations began to evolve from production plants that impose their products on their customers to sellers that apply the principles of marketing theories to reach the greatest number of markets and the greatest number of consumers.
As a result, companies hired a large fleet of salespeople, who had the ability to persuade, and began to leverage the media to run advertisements for their products by running advertisements on TV, radio and daily newspapers.
- Orientation towards marketing in its modern and innovative concept
Since the sixties of the last century, most markets have become saturated with goods and products, and there has been strong competition to reach the customer.
From there, production and service companies realized the need to develop marketing departments and include advanced strategies and tactics that keep pace with the times. Marketers have become of great strategic importance within the system, and they have a major role in decision-making.
Marketers now conduct research and market research, and as a result, they inform decision-makers about what to produce, where to sell it, and how to deliver the product to the consumer.
This has led to the emergence of a lot of marketing research to connect marketers and consumers, and to try to understand and estimate consumer needs.
Customer satisfaction has become one of the most important priorities for institutions, and the saying “the customer is always right” has become a reality and not just a slogan.
One of the most important aspects of this stage (in which we live today) is the interest in brands, the construction of a good reputation for the products and the work to convince the customer through psychological factors and understanding human desires.
Of course, the most important feature of this stage is the great interest in digital marketing, which is based on the use of modern technologies, especially the Internet. Internet presence through a corporate representation website and social networking sites has become an essential and obvious cornerstone for the success of any business.
Marketing in the modern era is based on customer satisfaction
Marketing in the modern era depends on creating and delivering added value to the consumer, through the right combination of quality, service and price (QSP), and on meeting consumer demands at the at the lowest possible cost.
Indeed, we live in the age of value, if companies are unable to sell a very high quality product at the lowest possible price, they will be out of the race. Today we live in a customer- and consumer-based economy where the customer is king due to the oversupply of products and services. Therefore, companies have changed their marketing approach from focusing on product manufacturing to focusing on customer ownership.
All workers in your company should focus on the customer and satisfy them first, because if you don't care about your customer, others will and take it from you.
Experts in the field of marketing believe that customers are one of the most important accounting assets of any business, and this appears in the accounting assets of any business under the heading of goodwill (goodwill is an intangible accounting asset, and it is valued for a big business with huge sums of money).
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