1.1 Marketing and the Marketing Process

• Marketing is the process by which companies create, communicate, deliver, and exchange offerings that have value for customers.
• According to Philip Kotler, marketing refers to the social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through offering and exchanging products and value with the other.
• Utility refers to a product’s usefulness to customers so that they are convinced enough to make a purchase. In other words, when you hear “utility” in marketing, think “usefulness to customers.”
• 4 Types of Utility

  1. Form Utility
  2. Time Utility
  3. Place Utility
  4. Possession Utility
• External interested parties include those outside the company, such as customers, creditors, suppliers, distributors, and even society at large.
• Internal marketing involves promoting the objectives, products, and services of a company to its internal constituents—particularly employees.
• Internal interested parties are entities that reside within the organization and that affect—or are affected by—the actions of the company.
• Interested parties are those persons or entities that have an interest in the success or failure of a company.
• Marketing creates place utility when it makes goods or services physically available, convenient, and accessible to customers.
• Marketers facilitate possession utility by ensuring that a product is relatively easy to acquire.
• Marketing creates time utility when it makes products and services available to customers so that they can buy it when it is most convenient for them.
• Form utility refers to how well an organization can increase the value of its product in the customer’s eyes by making changes and altering its physical appearance.
• The marketing process refers to the series of steps that assist businesses in planning, analyzing, implementing, and adjusting their marketing strategy.
• 5 Steps in Marketing Process

  1. Understanding the marketplace and customers
  2. Developing a customer-driven marketing strategy
  3. Delivering high customer value
  4. Grow profitable customer relations
  5. Capturing value from customers
• Marketing strategy refers to a business’s overall “game plan” to focus its limited resources in order to reach prospective customers and turn them into paying customers, hopefully for the long run.
• Customer value is the ratio between the perceived benefits and costs incurred by the customer in acquiring your products or services.