Marketing and its importance in Britain society - Essay Example

Running Head: Marketing and its importance in Britain society Marketing & British Society Academia Academia Research “Today’s central problem facing business is not a shortage of goods but a shortage of customers. Most of the world’s industries can produce far more goods than the world’s consumers can buy. Overcapacity results from individual competitors projecting a greater market share growth than is possible. If each company projects a 10 percent growth in its sales and the total market is growing by only 3 percent, the result is excess capacity. This in turn leads to hyper competition. Competitors, desperate to attract customers, lower their prices and add giveaways. These strategies ultimately mean lower margins, lower profits, some failing companies, and more mergers and acquisitions. Marketing is the answer to how to compete on bases other than price. Because of overcapacity, marketing has become more important than ever”(Kotler, 12: 2003). Marketing is a very vast term, a simple definition can be a place where the buyers buy and the sellers sell, now one can imagine that the place in the world where the buyers and sellers are doing all the desired work is in fact the entire world, so the term marketing is not just limited to the buying and selling but so many other things are also included in the same, although marketing is there in the world right from the beginning of this world though it was not actually known that it is known as marketing but it was still there, however the modern marketing which was quite familiar to the people of different societies came in view in the period of 1900 to 1940, particularly in the years of 1910 to 1925, the notable reason for the existence of true marketing was perhaps the saturation in the industrial sector of this world, the products were increasing and now people had gained the sense of what is right and what is wrong, what is more beneficial and what is less, where to invest and where not to, so these small growing facts gained the attention of many businessmen and related people and they started finding the ways through which they could have gained an edge over the others in terms of selling there items or units. “The majority of this development took place in the United States, although there were notable contributions also from Britain, especially in specialist sub-disciplines such as advertising” (Witzel: 2000). According to this statement the origins of marketing can be identified, it was mainly started from America but there was some popularity that it gained from Britain, according to another definition on marketing, “marketing meets the needs of markets by producing economic values which, while not so tangible, are qualitatively just as real and quantitatively more significant than those produced in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing” (Beckman, William: 3). The previously mentioned statement also brings the economic in relation to marketing, which is quite true, as the need of marketing is always identified when things start becoming more complicated in a place where to sell the product or service, at times when there are problems in demand and supply the marketing has a major role to play in terms of guiding the consumers for whom the entire marketing is conducted as an operation, though the core goal of every business is survival or growth, in terms of profitability but who is going to give the profitability? Of course the consumers and customers and secondly it is the job of marketing to make sure that all operations are conducted properly. “The larger size, multi-product, and multiple product lines manufactured by leading British and American companies investigated by Church and Clark and by Sally Clarke highlight two (among other) important themes. One focuses on the problem of deciding which products or product lines to manufacture; the other on relationships with distributors. Two of the enterprises examined in Church and Clarks study of J. & J. Colman, Reckitt & Sons, and Lever Bros, also began as single owner-managed businesses formed in the early nineteenth century” (Church, 2). The market in the modern world is comprised of 4ps, product, place (distribution), price, and promotion, if noticed carefully than the above statement is also emphasizing on the product and distribution, so it ensures that the modern marketing is the mixture of all the operation conducted internally and externally by a firm whether in manufacturing or service industry. According to another definition of marketing, “it is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual’s and company’s goals” (Kotler, 8: 2003). The marketing process starts right from the point when the organization starts asking questions to it self such as who are the customers? What the customers want? How the firm can satisfy its customer’s need? How could the fulfillment of customer’s needs benefit the organization? Keeping such questions in mind it involuntarily leads organization to marketing. The marketing has automatically brought not only Britain but also almost every country of this world as a representing symbol of some brands, just like Nike and Adidas are famous brands in most of the countries of the world, same with McDonalds, also Kellogg’s, Rolls Royce represents the rich British culture exactly as Ford and Mercedes represents their origin, it is all because of marketing without which no body would have known such brands outside their origins, the marketing has positive affects on the British society in every day life, firstly people started getting the knowledge of class system such as the upper and lower classes, they knew which brand are they capable of using, marketing helped them in settling themselves in a usual way without any fuss, it was because of marketing that people started knowing how to form budget and how to utilize their resources, secondly the marketing has made a place for a lot of people to get into it and make millions, this helped solving the job saturation issues and it created so much space for them to work and also helped the countries economy to grow, one of the best things is that it was because of marketing that so many other countries build relationships with Britain, one can understand it in terms that Advertising which is a major part of marketing when entered in this world than so many advertising firms were established around the world, as a result many multinationals came in view like Orient McCann, James Walter Thompson and they established themselves in almost every country, so there was a chain created all around the world which helped every country to be in touch with the other and producing similar sort of marketing for one single product which represents so many countries in a united way and this is perhaps the best characteristic of marketing around the globe. Marketing has also beautified so many countries, one can se that London is thickly populated but still looks good, because of outdoor advertisements and so many slogans and so much of publicity of various brands, the entire Britain is having a lot more common when it comes to marketing, even the readable and watchable material outside the bars and night clubs is a sort of marketing, which if wasn’t there than people of the society would have no idea about the ongoing activities in it, so it is all marketing’s game which we all(customers) are the part of. In this section we will discuss the strategies and theories of marketing, another good prospect of marketing is competition, but why competition? It is because of the competition that the quality of product increases and because of it the benefit is taken by the customers (us) because in the competition firms make their product’s quality higher while either reducing the prices or doing sales promotion, which includes customer incentives. There is a process of marketing that gives the entire concept of marketing, the process revolves around four basic things, Analyzing marketing opportunities in which the company analyzes the entire performance of the firm on to which they decide which areas require more of attention and than they look for the need of marketing, where to actually utilize their resources in a proper manner, they further look for the awareness level in the mind of consumers, whether the marketing would work for them or not and analyze relative questions. The second important step is selecting the target markets, here the company has to put a lot of efforts in determining their target audience, firstly they do market segmentation in which they have to divide the market in different group of buyers particularly on the basis of needs, behavior, and characteristics, the company’s pricing policy has a lot more role to play here, if the pricing is low than the company is perhaps catering the lower segment of the population which is in the high sums, at numerous times it has been seen that the company’s low pricing strategy doesn’t give them profitability, one relative example is that in the pharmaceutical business the doctor prescribes the medicine, and the customer would have to buy what ever doctor would prescribe, so no matter if the company’s pricing is high it would still be very profitable than a company whose pricing is not very high, in such cases the efforts are directed totally on the doctors rather than the customers, the second most important thing is the market targeting, here the company finally selects the segments that they think of serving, like Rolls Royce targeted the upper class in the British society, though they had previously formed segments, the third most important thing is known as market positioning in which the company finally tries to settle its product in the market, yet there is a lot of competition in the market but still the company has to find ways through which they can distinct their product from that of competitors, there is the main role of marketing that appears, the marketing serves as a communicator and it helps creating awareness, need and willingness to buy in the target segments, a good example can be that when a company named Sara Lee corp. perceived in their foods and services department the need of caution meat because of its rising demand in the Muslim community of Britain, they immediately started launching the same food by first informing through the sales outlet to the people and this created awareness, need and than willingness to buy. The next category is developing the marketing mix, “ For marketing to work, you must manage the marketing mix in an integrated fashion. Yet in many companies, responsibility for different elements of the marketing mix are in the hands of different individuals or departments” (Kotler, 128: 2003). The marketing mix is comprised of four basic tools already studied, the first of them is product, it consists of things related to the standard, this includes variety, for example different colors of a shirt, than comes quality, which includes the consumer’s general perception about the product, like one can see so many good products in the market failed at numerous occasions, the reason might be the quality, than comes design, which includes the outlook like it has been seen that chocolates of different designs attract people to buy them and same with sweets, than comes brand name which is perhaps the most important of them because in these days people tend to buy the product because of its name, also one thing should be kept in mind that the brand name should convey the message behind the product and it should be in the customers liking, the next tool is packaging which means the covering of the product, one can see that toothpastes have very fancy packaging and all the features clearly mentioned, as the customer cannot open the pack to see the inside product thus one has to be very careful in mentioning all the characteristics on the pack, the last tool of product section is service, if the customer buys a car than the company gives him/her a warranty which shows the company’s commitment to the customer and that is how it works. The second tool of marketing mix is price, the price is another important prospect related to the company, pricing should be kept in mind keeping few factors in mind such as, if the company is new than it should be set in accordance to break-even point (Zero profit-Zero loss situation), and if company’s main concern is profitability than pricing has the biggest role as we have earlier discussed the pharmaceutical case in which high pricing gives high profitability, than comes the third element of the marketing mix as promotion, it has four elements, the first one is advertising, the advertising is not all about creating TV commercials and print media, but it is all about creating awareness through a technological channel, it might be TV or print, or radio or outdoor, advertising is the most popular promotional tool which has a tendency to increase the sales revenue if done properly, the second element of promotional mix is personal selling, there are two things that are worthy to be kept in mind in personal selling, it is nature of product and nature of market, if the product is sensitive that is no body would buy the product or service if not explained the benefits in person such as the high-tech machinery as a product, than personal selling is encouraged, the second criteria is the nature of market that is if the market is not wide spread, that is the buyers are very few, such as only industrialist would prefer to buy the high-tech machinery than in this case personal selling is a suitable tool, the third component of promotion mix is sales promotion, this includes all the schemes such as buy 1 get 1 free, discounts, other complimentary gifts etc. the last one in promotion mix is public relations, it is something that company has to work on, public relations are the sponsorship that company does, such as English cricket board (ECB) is supported and sponsored by Vodafone. The last of all the marketing mix is Place (distribution) which is also an important task for the company manufacturing products, it is always related to a third party involvement, like after the product is manufactured the distribution starts and it is done by the distributors, they charge their profit and than the conflict arises, the best way to eliminate the conflict is to use Vertical Marketing Systems (VMS), in which both the manufacturer and distributor work together as a team to charge high from the customer. A case worthy to be discussed here is the case of Kellogg’s, they launched Kellogg’s Crunchy nuts, which failed to support the consumers tastes, it never meant that the previous products were doing well in the market and consumers had acquired the taste of them but the reason was something different, the company was first unable to realize the fact why the product didn’t do well, than on conducting research they realized that their advertisement was done in a wrong manner while considering the adults, though the product is suitable for children, they did create the advertisement showing the kids and adults both using it and it was a success. There is another interesting case related to Johnson and Johnson, it is considered to be the world’s most diversified company in terms of manufacturing health care products, it launched a product that was known as baby aspirin, another thing that the company claims to have is gentleness in their products, such as their baby shampoos and powders etc. in this case people took the gentleness wrong and thought that gentleness could not handle the pain, they were more concerned about their babies an thus the product was a failure, the company than realized that they had taken a wrong decision, the pricing strategy didn’t work for them at that time as people were concerned about their babies and the only choice the company had was to change the minds thus they created advertisement in a way that is showing the healing of pain and that gently, the product than got some recognition. Toyota lunched Lexus as a luxury symbol in 1989, they launched it against Mercedes, in advertisements they had shown it standing next to Mercedes and showing more smooth results, while one thing they had forgotten was to keep prices high, they had started selling the car on for $36000 where as Mercedes was $73000, there were so many other things done by Lexus such as showing consumers the video of Lexus magical engine working and the road grip it had, when the demand raised the company increased the prices, the strategy didn’t work for them as hoped, because they had set an image in the mind of target audience about luxury with economy, now it was really difficult to change the pricing, this lead to a failure in the sales of cars, and people stopped buying it, so the Lexus had to stick with its low pricing technique, one can understand what pricing can do in the sales revenue section of Income statement. The technology would be playing a beneficial role for marketing, in fact the technology has made a lot of difference in the marketing, which is all about communication, one can see that now internet or e-marketing is getting so common and it would keep on getting popularized day by day, there is an interesting Malaysian case on technology the way he managed to use the latest technology and did e-marketing and got the success in the market, the idea was actually introduced by a Malaysian business tycoon named Stelious Heji, he was running so many small and big businesses out of which there was an airline business named “easy jet”, in order to increase the customer satisfaction he gave an idea to this world in the beginning of the 21st century, he said that customer satisfaction can be increased if we are somehow managed to save the precious time of the customer in an airline business, further elaborating he said that it is fairly possible if we get the latest technology for our customers, what he did was quite simple, he used the e-business formula for this purpose, he said that we can minimize the customer’s time by giving him air ticket through internet, what the customer would have to do is that he would have to get on to the airline’s website, pay through the credit card, getting the ticket’s printout and the next thing would be traveling. This is perhaps the best example showing the recent communication or marketing way used and getting success, and in near future almost every thing would be on the bases of technology such as cinema tickets and similar sort of services, thus marketing has a very high and broad scope and it would keep on going on and on till the end. Work cited and other sources Kotler, Phillip, “Marketing insights from A to Z”, New Jersey: John Wiley and sons, 2003. Witzel, . Beckman J.N, William R.D, “Marketing”, New York: Ronald Press, 1967. Church, Roy, “The emergence of modern Marketing” London: F. Cass, 2003. Malhotra N.K., “Marketing Research”, (n.p): Pearson, 2004. Bartol, K.M., D. Martin, “Management”, New York: McGraw Hill, 1998. Kotler, P., “Marketing Management”. (n.p.): Prentice-Hall, 1999. Chrystal A., G. Lipsey, “ Economics for Business and Management”, Oxford: Oxford University press, 1997. Williams G.J., “ Ethics in Modern Management”, New York: Quorum Books, 1992. 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