Centrality Of Needs In Marketing

Marketing is the study and management of exchange relationships. Marketing is used to create, keep and satisfy the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, it can be concluded that Marketing is one of the premier components of Business Management - the other being Innovation.

Given the centrality of customer needs and wants in marketing, a rich understanding of these concepts is essential:

1. Needs: Something necessary for people to live a healthy, stable and safe life. When needs remain unfulfilled, there is a clear adverse outcome: a dysfunction or death. Needs can be objective and physical, such as the need for food, water and shelter; or subjective and psychological, such as the need to belong to a family or social

This third P has also sometimes been called Place, referring to the channel by which a product or service is sold, which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young adults, families, business people), etc. also referring to how the environment in which the product is sold in can affect sales.

• Promotion: This includes all aspects of marketing communications; advertising, sales promotion, including promotional education, public relations, personal selling, product placement, branded entertainment, event marketing, trade shows and exhibitions.

Marketing research.

Marketing research is a systematic process of analyzing data which involves conducting research to support marketing activities, and the statistical interpretation of data into information. This information is then used by managers to plan marketing activities, gauge the nature of a firm 's marketing environment and to attain information from suppliers.

Marketing research spans a number of stages, including:

• Define the

Marketing communications.

Is defined by actions a firm takes to communicate with end-users, consumers and external parties. Marketing communications encompasses four distinct subsets, which are:

Public Relations: Is the use of media tools by a firm in order to promote goodwill from an organization to a target market segment, or other consumers of a firm 's good/service. PR stems from the fact that a firm cannot seek to antagonize or inflame its market base, due to incurring a lessened demand for its good/service.

• Interviews

• Speeches/Presentations

Publicity: Involves attaining space in media, without having to pay directly for such coverage. As an example, an organization may have the launch of a new product covered by a newspaper or TV news segment. This benefits the firm in question since it is making consumers aware of its product, without necessarily paying a newspaper or television station to cover the event.

Advertising: Advertising occurs when a firm directly pays a media channel to publicize its product. Common examples of this include TV and radio adverts, billboards, branding, sponsorship,