1.3 Why Study Marketing?

Effective Marketing: Why Loyalty?

Products don’t, contrary to popular belief, sell themselves. Generally, the “build it and they will come” philosophy doesn’t work. Good marketing educates customers so that they can find the products they want, make better choices about those products, and extract the most value from them. In this way, marketing helps facilitate exchanges between buyers and sellers for the mutual benefit of both parties. Likewise, good social marketing provides people with information and helps them make healthier decisions for themselves and others.

Of course, all business students should understand all functional areas of the firm, including marketing. There is more to marketing, however than simply understanding its role in the business. Marketing has a tremendous impact on society.

Marketing Benefits Society

Marketing benefits society in general by improving people’s lives in two ways. First, as we mentioned, it facilitates trade. In economics, being able to trade makes people’s lives better. Otherwise, people wouldn’t do it. In addition, because better marketing means more successful companies, jobs are created. This generates wealth for people, who can then make purchases, which, in turn, creates more jobs.

The second way in which marketing improves the quality of life is based on the value delivery function of marketing but in a broader sense. When you add all the marketers together who are trying to deliver offerings of greater value to consumers and are effectively communicating that value, consumers are able to make more informed decisions about a wider array of choices. From an economic perspective, more choices and smarter consumers are indicative of a higher quality of life.

Marketing Costs Money

Marketing can sometimes be the largest expense associated with producing a product. In the soft drink business, marketing expenses account for about one-third of a product’s price—about the same as the ingredients used to make the soft drink itself. At the bottling and retailing level, the expenses involved in marketing a drink to consumers like you and me make up the product’s largest cost.

Some people argue that society does not benefit from marketing when it represents such a huge chunk of a product’s final price. In some cases, that argument is justified. Yet when marketing results in more informed consumers receiving a greater amount of value, then the cost is justified.

Marketing Offers People Career Opportunities

Marketing is the interface between producers and consumers. In other words, it is the one function in the organization in which the entire business comes together. Being responsible for both making money for your company and delivering satisfaction to your customers makes marketing a great career. In addition, because marketing can be such an expensive part of a business and is so critical to its success, companies actively seek good marketing people. At the beginning of each chapter in this book, we profile a person in the marketing profession and let that person describe for you what he or she does. There’s a great variety of jobs available in the marketing profession. These positions represent only a few of the opportunities available in marketing.

• Marketing research. Personnel in marketing research are responsible for studying markets and customers in order to understand what strategies or tactics might work best for firms.
• Merchandising. In retailing, merchandisers are responsible for developing strategies regarding what products wholesalers should carry to sell to retailers such as Target and Walmart.
• Sales. Salespeople meet with customers, determine their needs, propose offerings, and make sure that the customer is satisfied. Sales departments can also include sales support teams who work on creating the offering.
• Advertising. Whether it’s for an advertising agency or inside a company, some marketing personnel work on advertising. Television commercials and print ads are only part of the advertising mix. Many people who work in advertising spend all their time creating advertising for electronic media, such as websites and their pop-up ads, podcasts, and the like.
• Product development. People in product development are responsible for identifying and creating features that meet the needs of a firm’s customers. They often work with engineers or other technical personnel to ensure that value is created.
• Direct marketing. Professionals in direct marketing communicate directly with customers about a company’s product offerings via channels such as e-mail, chat lines, telephone, or direct mail.
• Digital media. Digital media professionals combine advertising, direct marketing, and other areas of marketing to communicate directly with customers via social media, the web, and mobile media (including texts). They also work with statisticians to determine which consumers receive which message and with IT professionals to create the right look and feel for digital media.
• Event marketing. Some marketing personnel plan special events, orchestrating face-to-face conversations with potential and current customers in a special setting.
• Nonprofit marketing. Nonprofit marketers often don’t get to do everything listed previously, as nonprofits typically have smaller budgets. But their work is always very important as they try to change behaviours without having a product to sell.

A career in marketing can begin in several different ways. Entry-level positions for new college graduates are available in many previously mentioned positions. A growing number of CEOs are people with marketing backgrounds.

“1.3 Why Study Marketing” from Principles of Marketing by [Author removed at request of original publisher] is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.