What is Marketing?

Before I enrolled in this course, I had a common perception of marketing as all about promoting and selling. But after taking a few of the marketing lectures, I realized that it’s more than promoting and selling a product. In reality, marketing sits at the intersection of the business and the customer — the great arbiter of the self-interests of the business and the needs of the buyer.

Through this course, I was able to understand:

• Marketing is the key to an organization’s success, regardless of its size.
• At a fundamental level, marketing is the process of understanding your customers and building and maintaining relationships with them.
• Marketing is about connecting the right customers to the right product.
• Marketing helps sales teams and people throughout the company, as it conveys its value in customer-centric ways and persists through barriers that can only be addressed through deep customer knowledge and insight.
• Furthermore, new products require a transformation in the organization that offers the innovation as much as the one that buys it, as unleashing the full power of marketing is critical to achieving that transformation.

I believe that brand switching is the behavior of the customer. Therefore, companies must constantly keep up with the types of products and services customers want. For instance, the company may introduce a new drink with two flavors: strawberry and blueberry. However, to increase market share, they may need to add other flavors that consumers want. Otherwise, consumers may start buying other drinks with these flavors. So, marketing departments need to adapt their fundamental business models, structures, and modes of operations to match growing customer expectations and demands.

Marketers are the ones that are responsible for improving the public relations of the company. They are constantly required to communicate the company’s product policy with the customers, in order to generate hype in the market. Marketers in today’s world are constantly inundated with fresh ideas, new platforms for promoting their businesses, and new technologies to take advantage of. While these innovations are often exciting and beneficial, keeping up with the changes can be a challenging task. The list of challenges is mentioned as follows:

· Lack of Resources.

· Brand Awareness.

· Creating Engaging Content

· Creating consistent branding

· Prioritizing Highest ROI marketing tactics

· Acquiring accurate data

· Learning about customer changing interests

· Lack of Industry Awareness and Education

· Struggling to keep up with the changing marketing rules and regulations

In conclusion, I believe that to overcome these challenges marketing strategy lays out the overall aims and direction of the marketing and marketing plan will provide the details of the actual activities that will be carried out to achieve these goals.

Therefore, both marketing strategy and marketing plan are keys to long-term success, whether the business is a small startup or a global organization.