In view of the dynamic nature of the marketing environment, to what extent do you consider consumers to be, in practice, central to marketing activities
Marketing Assignment
In view of the dynamic nature of the marketing environment, to what extent do you consider consumers to be, in practice, central to marketing activities?
Introduction
What is marketing? ‘Satisfying needs and wants through an exchange process’ defined by Philip Kotler. There are many definitions of marketing. However, most of these definitions focus on the same point – Satisfying customers needs. In these day and year, marketing has changed over a period of time. It’s not only in the old sense of making a sale – ‘telling and selling’, but also is in the new sense of satisfying customer needs. That means marketing is based around providing continual benefits to the customer and transactional exchanges will occur.
This paper divided into six sections. After this introduction is an explanation of the nature of the environment within which marketing takes place. Then the focus goes to the understanding of the ever-changing nature of the marketing environment and how this impacts on marketing activities. After that, it discusses meaningfully the central role of consumers in the formulation of a marketing strategy. The second last section looks at the relative importance of consumers and the marketing environment in the implementation of a marketing plan. Finally, a conclusion is drawn.
The nature of the environment within which marketing takes place
Marketing environment involves a microenvironment and a macroenvironment. In the microenvironment, managers cannot achieve their goal on their own. Therefore, their achievement will depend on other factors. Microenvironment affects the organization or firm directly. It consists of the company, suppliers, marketing intermediaries, customer, and competitor. For the company, it should have a perfect structure of a company such as top management, finance, research and development, purchasing, manufacturing and accounting. Those elements will affect companies directly. For example: accounting has to calculate revenues and costs to help marketing know how well it is achieving its goals. If not, the company’s finance will get a risk because the company won’t know if it achieves the goal. For the supplier, they provide the resources to the company for producing its good and service. Therefore, the development of suppliers will affect the marketing. In the other word, that means managers must concern supply availability such as labour strikes and delays. Nowadays, however, marketers are treating their suppliers as partners in creating and delivering customer value. For the marketing intermediaries, it is a medium for helping companies to distribute their goods or services to final buyers. It directly influences the income of the company and the entire marketing as the distribution of goods and services. For customer, companies have to focus on their customer market effectively. As mentioned before, marketing is used to satisfy customer needs. Yet different markets have different characteristics which call for careful study by the seller. For example: government markets are made up of government agenise that buy goods and services in order to produce public services or transfer the goods and services to others who need them. Thus, if the marketer made a decision wrong for customer, it would influence the government or a country in this cause. For the competitor, according to marketing concept, a company has to supply better satisfaction than its competitors do. Thus, they have to develop strategies to benefit their company and their customers getting value.
