An Overview of Marketing

Marketing is a particularly practical business discipline. There may be many definitions of marketing, but all of them consider the customer to be the focus of decision-making, and all of them describe the dialogue between the producer and the customer—increasingly as it takes place in a global context. Marketing efforts vary, depending on the different circumstances within which they are practiced. It is important to see marketing’s role in an overarching context, reaching beyond the organization to encompass the entire client and supplier system in an outward-looking way that matches corporate capabilities with the requirements of customers and permits them to acquire desired benefits most efficiently. The various elements of marketing that are employed in marketing campaigns are known as the marketing mix and are often described in terms of the 4 Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. This mix can be applied not just to the goods sector but also to services and the nonprofit arena. The implementation of the marketing mix, however, is complex due to multiple decision-makers and an enormous flow of information, the interaction of multiple decision factors on the part of buyers, and global demand and supply linkages. In light of the need to exercise growing responsiveness to changing societal demands and expectations in areas such as the environment and ethics and the expanding ability of marketers to use technology, focusing on the double bottom-line-oriented approach to understand and contribute to the needs of customers and the overall socioeconomic and ecological setting where a company operates its business, a new marketing paradigm is emerging in which marketers are poised to become the strategic leaders of the corporate supply system.