THE CENTRALITY OF MARKETING

“The last stage of fitting the product to the market

is fitting the market to the product.”

(Clive James, Australian writer and broadcaster)

Most management and marketing writers now distinguish between selling and marketing. The ‘selling concept’ assumes that resisting consumers have to be persuaded to buy non-essential goods or services. The ‘marketing concept’, on the contrary, assumes that the producer’s task is to find wants and to fill them. As well as satisfying existing needs, marketers can also create new ones.

Marketers are always looking for market opportunities – profitable possibilities of filling unsatisfied needs or creating new ones in areas the company is likely to enjoy a differential advantage. Market opportunities are generally isolated by market segmentation. A company has to decide what goods or service to offer. This means that much of the work of marketing has been done before the final product comes into existence. The company must also take into account the existence of competitors.

Rather than risk launching a product or service on the basis of intuition, most companies undertake market research (GB) or marketing research (US). They collect and analyze the information about the potential market, about consumer reaction to particular product or service and so on.Sales representatives are another important source of information.

Once a product concept has been established, the company has to think about the marketing mix, i.e. the various elements of marketing program. The best-known classification of these elements is the ‘4 Ps’: product, place, promotion and price. Aspects in marketing products include quality, features, style, brand name, size, packaging, services and guarantee. Place in marketing includes distribution channels, points of sale, transport, inventory size, etc. Promotion groups together advertising, publicity, sales promotion, personal selling, while price includes the basic list price, discount, payment period, credit terms, and so on. The producer market is larger than the consumer market since it contains all the raw materials, manufactured parts and components, plus capital equipment such as buildings, machines, energy, and services ranging from cleaning to management consulting. Consequently, there is more industrial than consumer marketing. It must be remembered that apart from consumer markets there exists an enormous producer or industrial or business market.

Ø Comprehension:

1. Characterize the ‘selling concept’ and the ‘marketing concept’.

2. Why do companies undertake market research?

3. What is marketing mix?

4. Characterize each component of marketing mix.

5. What does a producer market consist of?

Ø Summarizing:

Complete the following sentences to summarize the text above:

1. There are two concepts in modern marketing, the ‘selling concept and ... .

2. The ‘selling concept’ assumes that ... .

3. The ‘marketing concept’ assumes that ... .

4. The various elements of marketing program are called ... .

5. Apart from consumer markets there are ... .

Ø True-false questions:

Ø Viewpoint:

Can marketing and selling be opposed or are they part and parcel of each other?