Introduction to Marketing Management
Objectives:
1. Defining contemporary marketing.
2. Exploring marketing management, particularly from a European perspective – locally,
nationally and internationally.
3. Designing marketing strategies and plans.
4. Understanding the challenges of digital technology management in marketing.
Why marketing is important?
The value of marketing
• Marketing managers are challenged to deliver value and profits in the face of an unforgiving economic
environment, unprecedented changes in business, growing globalization, climate change concerns and
continuing digital technology advancement. Finance, operations, accounting, and other business
functions are all dependent on sufficient demand for products and services from customers who are
prepared to pay for them so that companies can make a profit. Thus, financial success often depends on
marketing ability.
• Marketing skill can be used to market ten main types of entities:
1. Products
2. Services
3. Events
4. Experiences
5. People
6. Places
7. Properties
8. Non-Profits
9. Information
10. Ideas
• Marketing’s value also extends to society as a whole. It has helped introduce new or
enhanced products and services that ease or enrich people’s lives. Successful
marketing builds demand for products and services, which in turn creates jobs. By
contributing to the bottom line, successful marketing also allows firms to engage in
socially responsible activities more fully.
The scope of marketing
• Marketing is about identifying and meeting human and social needs at a profit. One of
the shortest definitions of marketing is that it is the process of ‘meeting customer needs
profitably’.
• A formal definition is that marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and
delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. The marketing
concept focuses on a total company effort to provide exchange and value for
customers, clients partners and society. Coping with these exchange processes calls for
a considerable amount of work and skill. Marketing management takes place when at
least one party to a potential exchange thinks about the means of achieving desired
responses from other parties. Thus, we see marketing management as the managerial
responsibility that aligns the total company effort towards choosing and satisfying target
market(s) by getting, keeping and growing customers through creating, delivering and
communicating superior customer value at a profit to the organization.
• Marketing is an often–misunderstood term, seen more as ‘the art of selling products or
advertising, and many people are surprised when the full extent of marketing beyond
selling, and advertising is articulated. The reality is that selling, and advertising are only
the tip of the marketing iceberg
Marketing’s role in creating demand
• Marketers must be skilled at stimulating and managing demand. Demand is the
willingness and ability of buyers to purchase different quantities of a product or service,
at different prices, during a specific time period. Both willingness and ability must be
present; if either is missing, there is no demand. Great marketing is when you see an
unfulfilled need and launch an appropriate offering, and the offering matches this need
and there is demand and ultimately profitable sales of your offering.
• Marketing managers seek to influence the level, timing and composition of demand to
meet the organization’s objectives. Marketers must identify the underlying cause(s) of
the demand state and then determine a plan of action to shift the demand to a more
