Chapter 13: Marketing in Today's World

To market a product successfully, a company has to understand what people want to buy and why they want to buy it.
It all comes down to knowing your market.
From a marketing viewpoint, a $market$ is a group of customers who share common wants and needs.
$Marketing$ is the process of creating, promoting, and presenting a product or service to meet the wants and needs of consumers, wherever they are. * Marketing involves a number of stages, from studying what people want to buy to designing a product’s packaging.

There are seven functions of marketing. * Distribution is the process of getting goods and services to customers. * Financing is getting the money that is necessary for setting up and running a business. * Marketing information management is gathering and analyzing information about consumers, trends, and competitors’ products. * Pricing is deciding how much to charge for a product or service so the business can make a profit. * Product/service management is obtaining, developing, maintaining, and improving a product or product mix in response to market opportunities. * Promotion is any effort to inform, persuade, or remind potential customers about a business’s products or services. * Selling is providing customers with the goods and services they choose to buy.
A popular trend today is using relationship marketing.
Companies use $relationship marketing$ to build and maintain relationships with their customers.

The $marketing mix$ consists of four basic marketing strategies: product, place, price, and promotion, collectively known as the four Ps.
In recent years, many people have begun to include a fifth P for people because the success of a marketing mix depends on people: good employees and customers.
First, marketing is used to find out if there is a demand for a product. * Marketers have to decide how and where customers will buy their goods and services
To make place decisions, marketers select the right channel of distribution. * A $channel of distribution$ is a pathway to direct products to consumers. * Direct distribution occurs when goods or services are sold from the producer directly to the customer. * $Indirect distribution$ involves one or more intermediaries.
To determine the price of a product, a marketer considers three questions: * (1) How much are customers willing to pay? * (2) Is the price competitive with other products? and * (3) Can the company make a profit?
Marketers must find the break-even point. * The $break-even point$ is the point at which total revenues, or sales, equal total costs and expenses of developing and offering a product or service.
Promotion involves making customers aware of a product.
The most familiar form of promotion is advertising

$Market research$ is the gathering and analysis of information on the size, location, and makeup of a market. * Market research helps companies to produce and market products and services that attract customers.
This is known as the marketing concept. * The $marketing concept$ involves determining the wants and needs of customers and providing them more efficiently and effectively than competitors.
$Demographics$ are facts about the population
$Target marketing$ helps companies focus on the people most likely to buy their goods or services.
$Market segmentation$ is the division of a market for a product into groups of customers who have the same needs and traits.

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Generate ideas
Screen ideas
Develop a business plan
Develop the product * A prototype is a model of the actual product
Test-market the product * To $test-market$ a product means to offer it in a limited market for a limited time
Introduce the product
Evaluate customer acceptance