Marketing 101: The Basics
POP QUIZ! If I asked you to define the concept of marketing, which answer would you select?
A ) The process of advertising and selling products.
B ) The process of making people aware of products.
C ) The process of designing and packaging a product.
D ) The process of getting products into the “market.â€
E ) The process of setting prices and determining supply and demand for a
product.
F ) None of the above.
Got your answer? Good. Now, if you selected one of the choices from answers A-E, give yourself a pat on the back; you’re absolutely right in saying that this answer is a part of marketing. But please understand, too, that you’re wrong; the correct answer is F. Because while marketing does involve all of the activities listed in answers A- E, it’s actually much broader in concept than all of those activities combined.
The American Marketing Association defines marketing this way:
Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.
In other words, marketing is the part of the business that focuses on filling the needs of customers with great products or services and making sure that they come back for more. And while this includes many of the things that most people associate with marketing (advertising, sales, packaging, pricing, promotional offers, focus groups, clever titles, good logos, market research and so forth), these activities are simply the visible by-products of the practice of marketing.
This sounds a lot more academic than it really should, mainly because marketing people like to spend a lot of time disagreeing about the purposes of their profession. But the basic idea of marketing is actually pretty easy to understand once you grasp the perspective, and I’d even go so far as to argue that for most small businesses, it’s simply an organized way of managing the activities needed to get a product created, promoted, priced and delivered. Practically speaking, marketing is the most important part of business, because it helps businesses to better understand their customers and respond accordingly with products that meet those customers’ needs.
Before I continue, let me note that the word “needs†does not merely mean “necessities†when you’re discussing marketing; it can mean “wants†or “desires†or “wish list item†or anything else that specifies the reason a consumer might purchase a product or use a service. In the book publishing industry, needs tend to boil down to three categories:
- Information (such as a self-help guide, a reference book,
or a how-to book) - ment (such as a novel, comic book, or celebrity biography)
- Requirement (such as a class textbook or an operations manual)
There are other categories (religious texts, for example, or blank, bound journals) that may fall outside of these classifications, but, broadly speaking, these three categories cover 99% of the titles being published to be sold as books.
Now, as I said, the idea of marketing is to locate a segment of the Earth’s population, figure out what that segment needs, and then deliver on that need. So, if you’re a soap manufacturer, you might look into how people in your hometown prefer to buy soap these days – if they prefer traditional bars, scented ergonomic bars, soap on a rope, or liquid soap. If you find that these consumers desperately want soap on a rope, but they can’t buy it anywhere, you could respond by creating soap on a rope and selling it to them. The consumers
you’ve targeted are your “target market.†The soap on a rope is your “product.†And the process of creating the product, making it available and selling it is marketing at is most basic.
See? I told you it wasn’t that difficult to understand.
The problem is that marketing a product is rarely so simple as finding a need, creating a solution, and making money. Manufacturers (the people who create the product) rarely sell their goods directly to consumers; they usually sell their goods to retail outlets or, to make things even more complicated, to “distributors†or “wholesalers,†who act as middlemen between the manufacturer and the retailers. But don’t get too annoyed with the middlemen; they’re actually a necessary part of the business!
To find out why, check out my next article, Marketing 101: Don’t Blame the Middleman!.
-SJJ
Articles, Marketing 101 | SeanJJordan | 
July 23, 2007 3:08 am
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