WHAT IS MARKETING?

The good news is that you are already a marketing expert! You perform many marketing activities and make marketing-related decisions every day. For example, would you sell more LG 55-inch 3D OLED HD Smart TVs at $9,999 or $999 each? You answered $999, right? So your experience in shopping gives you some expertise in marketing. As a consumer, you’ve been involved in thousands of marketing decisions, but mostly on the buying and not the selling side. But to test your expertise, answer the “marketing expert” questions posed  You’ll find the answers within the next several pages.

The bad news is that good marketing isn’t always easy. That’s why every year thousands of new products fail in the marketplace and then quietly slide into oblivion.

Are you a marketing expert? If so, what would you pay for this cutting-edge TV?

Marketing and Your Career

Marketing affects all individuals, all organizations, all industries, and all countries. This book seeks to teach you marketing concepts, often by having you actually “do marketing”—by putting you in the shoes of a marketing manager facing actual marketing decisions. The book also shows marketing’s many applications and how it affects our lives. This knowledge should make you a better consumer and enable you to be a more informed citizen, and it may even help you in your career planning.

Perhaps your future will involve doing sales and marketing for a large organization. Working for a well-known company—Apple, Ford, Facebook, or General Mills—can be personally satisfying and financially rewarding, and you may gain special respect from your friends.

Small businesses also offer marketing careers. Small businesses are the source of the majority of new U.S. jobs. So you might become your own boss by being an entrepreneur and starting your own business.

For time to think and write software code, the chief executive officer of the world’s largest social media company sometimes hides out at a restaurant near his Silicon Valley headquarters.

In February 2004, a 19-year-old college sophomore from Harvard University started his own small web service business from his dorm room. He billed it as “an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges.” That student, of course, was Mark Zuckerberg.The success of the Facebook launch defies comprehension. Zuckerberg’s Thefacebook.com website signed up 900 Harvard students in the four days after it appeared in early 2004. By the second week, there were almost 5,000 members. Unlike Facebook, not every Internet start-up reaches over a billion users a few years after its launch. In fact, more than half of all new businesses fail within five years of their start-up.

Define marketing and identify the diverse factors that influence marketing actions.

Marketing: Delivering Benefits to the Organization, Its Stakeholders, and Society

The American Marketing Association represents marketing professionals. Combining its 2004 and 2007 definitions, “ marketing  is the activity for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that benefit its customers, the organization, its stakeholders, and society at large.”9 This definition shows that marketing is far more than simply advertising or personal selling. It stresses the need to deliver genuine benefits in the offerings of goods, services, and ideas marketed to customers. Also, note that the organization doing the marketing, the stakeholders affected (such as customers, employees, suppliers, and shareholders), and society should all benefit.

To serve both buyers and sellers, marketing seeks (1) to discover the needs and wants of prospective customers and (2) to satisfy them. These prospective customers include both individuals, buying for themselves and their households, and organizations, buying for their own use (such as manufacturers) or for resale (such as wholesalers and retailers). The key to achieving these two objectives is the idea of  exchange , which is the trade of things of value between a buyer and a seller so that each is better off after the trade.