Core Marketing Concepts: Needs, Value, and Markets
All successful companies are strongly focused on marketing. These companies make an effort to understand and satisfy customer needs. They motivate workers to help build strong customer relationships based on creating value.
What is Marketing?
It is the set of adaptive processes by which organizations collaborate with customers and partners to create, communicate, deliver, and share value.
Marketing Defined
Marketing must be understood in terms of satisfying customer needs. If customer needs are understood, products providing superior value are developed, priced well, distributed, and promoted effectively, these products will sell easily.
Selling and advertising are only part of the marketing mix. Broadly defined, marketing is a social and managerial process by which individuals and organizations obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging value with others.
Understanding the Marketplace and Customer Needs
Customer Needs, Wants, and Demands
Companies with a marketing orientation must learn about customers’ needs, wants, and demands. They then create market offerings to satisfy these needs, wants, and demands.
- Needs: States of felt deprivation. These include basic physical needs for food, clothing, warmth, and safety; social needs for belonging and affection; and individual needs for knowledge and self-expression.
- Wants: The form human needs take as they are shaped by culture and individual personality.
- Demands: Human wants that are backed by buying power.
Market Offerings: Products, Services, Experiences
Customers’ needs and wants are fulfilled through market offerings. Market offerings are a combination of products, services, information, or experiences offered to a market to satisfy a need or want. Offerings are not limited only to physical products but also include services, activities, benefits, persons, places, organizations, information, and ideas.
Marketing myopia: The mistake of paying more attention to the specific products a company offers than to the benefits and experiences produced by these products. They focus only on existing wants and lose sight of underlying customer needs. Ultimately, a product is only a tool to solve a consumer problem.
Customer Value and Satisfaction
Customers form expectations about the value and satisfaction that various market offerings will deliver, and they buy accordingly. Marketers must be careful to set the right level of expectations. If they set expectations too low, they may satisfy those who buy but fail to attract enough buyers. If they set expectations too high, buyers will be disappointed.
Exchanges and Relationships
Marketing occurs when people decide to satisfy their needs and wants through exchange relationships. Exchange is the act of obtaining a desired object from someone by offering something in return.
Markets
A market is the set of actual and potential buyers of a product or service. Sellers must search for buyers, identify their needs, design good marketing offerings, set prices for them, promote them, and store and deliver them.