Marketing
What should the role of marketing be?
Marketing is a process for understanding and managing market demand in ways that achieve the company's revenue goals. It should provide direction, focus and support for a company's sales.
Every company begins with the idea for a product or service. But it's not a business until it has customers and sales. Marketing is the bridge between.
The growth of fierce competition, increasing market fragmentation and complexity, and customers who are experienced, sophisticated and well-informed combine to make marketing more important today than ever before. Once, companies could afford to be product-focused; today it's the buyer who has the power. Without marketing, sales people focus on the product or service and become irrelevant to prospects. With it, they focus on the customer's point of pain - and close sales.
Marketing enables a company to be customer-centric, the first requirement for success in today's customer-driven marketplace. The first step is to thoroughly and accurately understand what target customers think and, specifically, what they need and want. The second is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their alternatives to your own product or service - not just competitors but their in-house capabilities. The third is to understand market trends, the environment where you, your customers and competitors do business.
With this information, your company can target specific market segments and subsegments, and establish a market position. Size, growth rate, ability to pay, and competitive intensity are key criteria in selecting an attractive market segment. Segment focus is essential to achieving market impact and deploying sales resources effectively.
Knowing what customers in the target market need and want is critical to product/service design - and it can change over time. You need to monitor product design regularly in the context of customer needs and wants, competitive offerings, and marketplace trends.
Market positioning is the way your product or service will be defined by customers. Its foundation is your product's or service's differentiation and competitive advantage. What about your product is most highly valued by customers? What makes it most distinctive in their ideas? How can you make this preemptive so competitors won't try to copy it?
Knowing the answers then enables you to determine, the brand identity, the sales strategy, and, ultimately, the communications strategy.
The role of marketing thus consists of research, and development of products, strategies and tactics that will enable your business to make sales and grow revenue by creating customers and then retaining them by delivering consistent value.