The Role Of Marketing

It all started in the early 1960s when Professor E. Jerome McCarthy from the Harvard Business School introduced the notion of the Four Ps that make up a marketing mix. The Four Ps was supposed to be a checklist that marketeers (marketing professionals) could draw on to ensure they were meeting the goals set by the companies that employed them. Understandably, that goal was not only to meet the needs of the customers but getting value in return.

The first P to focus on is the Product. Market research underpins the efforts at finding out what the customers’ needs are, what groups of customers the company would prefer to serve (its target markets), and what products or services to develop or how to adjust the existing ones to continue to meet those ever-changing needs. At this stage, it is of utmost importance to establish a product’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP). That simply means answering the question of why a prospective customer should choose your product over a similar product offered by the competition.

The second P stands for the Price, or setting prices that are attractive to customers and profitable for the company. This step also requires keeping a close eye on what the competition is doing. After the first two stages have been completed, it is time to move on to the third stage and consider the Place of sale, or find suitable distribution channels and outlets to reach target customers. These three Ps are sometimes referred to as internal marketing.

However, what the public generally associates with marketing is the final stage or the fourth P, which is Promotion or outbound marketing. Companies should by no means jump right into outbound marketing, because it could result in them trying to push their products onto people who do not want them at all (the fact that they do not need them is not so crucial). Neglecting the inbound activities is like doing a shooting practice without identifying your target. When the time is ripe, promotion focuses on defining the product’s personality, its naming and branding. It is far more than employing advertising techniques to bring product to the attention of potential and current customers. Apart from being the most visible aspect of marketing, promotion involves all the activities used in supporting the product from pre-sales information to after-sales service.

Following these seemingly simple steps, the company will gain new customers and retain the existing ones. Once the market becomes saturated, the marketing department will find a way to penetrate new markets.

Although marketers may not be popular with their colleagues in other departments, they will closely cooperate with engineers to translate their brilliant ideas into a language understandable to customers, and other experts to find offerings (products, services and combinations of these) that will appeal to customers. Thinking of marketing in these terms helps maintain a customer orientation that will ensure a steady flow of income even in a time of economic downturn which we are now facing.