Marketing Management

Read the text and do the tasks that follows.

The purpose of this unit is to provide you with an understanding of the fundamental concepts and techniques of marketing decision making. Although we will begin with a discussion of individual elements of a marketing program, our ultimate goal is the improvement of your ability to integrate these individual elements into a well-reasoned and practical marketing plan. Such a plan connects the organization's aims and abilities with the customers' needs and wants in the context of an environ­ment. Several of these terms merit classification at the outset.

There have been innumerable definitions of marketing management - no individual phrasing has captured universal acceptance. Most contemporary definitions include the following notions:

1. Marketing management is purposeful - those in it are attempting to accomplish organizational objectives such as dollar profit, share of market, political candidate's success, charity donation goals, etc. The most common goal is profit, but it is not the goal in all situations.

2. Marketing management is designed to satisfy the needs and/or wants of constituencies; for managements to achieve organizational goals, some constituency (hereafter referred to as customer group or consumer group) must buy a product, service, or idea from the organization.

3. Marketing management involves trade-offs - an organization's resources (dollars, skills, location, costs) impose limits on how well it can meet the requirements of its customers. No organization can be all things to all people. Thus, marketing managers must decide upon a specific customer group to whom to cater (called the market target) and decide what, of the several alternative possibilities, it will offer to that group.

4. Marketing management is competitive - with rare exceptions, organizations must compete for the attention, initial pa­tronage, and continoues patronage of their customers. Sometimes the competition is very direct (one shaving cream versus another) and sometimes very indirect (the relative share of milk versus other beverages in individuals' daily fluid intake). Usually there is a spectrum of competitive offerings a manager must "better" to obtain and maintain customers' patronage.

5. Marketing decision making can be improved via a combination of experience and academic discipline; while only a few would maintain marketing management is a science, most knowledgeable individuals would agree that there are some conventional wisdom and "fundamental concepts."

The above five points are all essential to an understanding of what modern marketing management entails. Marketing does not equal selling, nor does it equal advertising. Marketing is an approach to improving the relationship between an organization and its existing (or sought-after) clientele. Most business observers can cite countless examples of successful marketers and unsuccessful ones.