What is marketing?
Simply put, marketing is getting customers to purchase your product or service. Do not confuse marketing with advertising. Marketing is everything you do to get your customer to buy your product.
One aspect of marketing is to let the customer know about your product and what are the different schemes and features you offer. This aspect where you share information about your product with your customer. This is advertising.
On the other hand marketing is everything you have to do like, setting your product price, giving your product the right packaging etc.
This page just gives you a brief introduction to marketing. To understand the process of marketing in much more detail, go to our “How to market?” article.
The marketing decisions that you will have to take while starting a new business are about the following:
- Selection of target markets
- Product
- Pricing
- Promotion
Selection of target markets:
A common mistake entrepreneurs make is, they try to ‘be all things to all people’. To run a successful business and successful marketing campaign, it is important to concentrate marketing on one specified group of your customers.
This specified group of customers forms your target market. Select target market on the basis of your ability to serve them relative to your competition. Also make sure that the target market you select is substantial enough to be profitable.
Product:
When you market your product, do not only market your bare product. Along with your product, market your products quality, style, colors, options, installation, warranty etc. Even though you may have a great product, it is important that your product is packaged properly. By proper packaging we do not only mean its appearance. We also mean every thing that comes with your product (like the style, colors, options, installation, warranty etc.)
Pricing:
The pricing decision is not only the decision about what the price of the product is going to be. It covers many other things. Consider the following to help you make pricing decisions about your product:
- Cost: In the long term your pricing must cover your costs of doing business.
- Competition: What is your competition offering and how much are they charging?
- Systems price: What is the total price your customer has to pay to purchase your product? For example: Postal charges, phone charges, parking, transportation etc. Is there a way to minimize these costs for the customer?
- Market demand: How price sensitive are potential customers? What are their perceptions of a fair price?
- Non-monetary price: How much time, inconvenience or anxiety must customers pay in order to acquire and use your products?
- Objectives: For example: Lower price may draw more customers giving you a large market share while a higher price might reflect that yours is a high quality product with prestige.
Promotion & Advertising:
However good your product is, people need to know it exists if they are to purchase it. You will need to promote and tell people about the product you are selling. There are many ways to promote your product. Here are certain things you could do to promote your product:
- Advertising: Through radio, television, magazines, direct mail, billboards etc.
- Personal selling: Going door-to-door and making sales presentations about your products.
- Sales promotion: Offering free gifts, coupons, scratch cards etc.
- Publicity: News stories, success stories, newspaper articles about new products or budding entrepreneurs etc.
New age marketing!
Everything we have explained in this article is just the basics of marketing. There is lot more to learn. New developments are constantly being made in the field of marketing. Now-a-days, because of marketing that is present everywhere, people have become immune to marketing. They are not motivated by advertisements any more.
To overcome this, a new breed of marketing is being developed. It is in it's early stages yet, but it is growing. It is called "viral" or "buzz" or "word-of-mouth" marketing. The idea is that, people do not believe advertisements anymore. They do not trust advertisements anymore. So, if you want to advertise, you will have to do it though other people. People will trust what their friends have to say even though they will not trust advertisements.
To understand this new kind of marketing, we reccommend that you read the book "Tipping Point".