POM: Session1: Introduction to Marketing

This world is full of competition. Just a short time age, Myspace, Yahoo!, Kodak, Nokia, and BPL, were admired leaders in their industries (Kotler, 2017, p. 4). But now they are taken over by the winners of today, Facebook, Netflix, Google, and Amazon. There are some other companies that maintain a balance, like Raymond’s, Godrej, Maruti, and Parle. How did they do it? Some did it with their unique products (Apple), some with innovation (IBM and Samsung), some with pure utility and best practice (Google), some with leadership (Facebook) but all with their marketing. 

According to Seth Godin, "Marketing is not about the stuff that you make, but about the stories that you tell". How many of you get up in the morning and check what “friendaversary” are you celebrating today or what is the memory of the day? Or just feel happy to see Google doodle of the day. You may forget upcoming festivals and occasions, but Amazon, Flipkart, and Snapdeal will never let you down.

Chinese e-tailer Alibaba has seen the opportunity in what was started by some founded by Nanjing University students in 1993. To push back against the social pressure of being in a relationship on 11.11 (read 11th November), they started celebrating "Anti-Valentine's Day or Single's Day). Alibaba saw this opportunity to target Chinese single population of 200 million by giving them discounts on several purchases. According to reports this year, i.e. in 2017, the sales on Single's day has reached around $25 billion.

A marketing practitioner, Beth Comstock says that "you can't sell anything if you can't tell anything". Storytelling is what makes people know things like, what pollution level is okay as per WHO and how much we are having in our homes. More surprising is to know about the sources of pollution. (Honeywell, 2017).

Some other companies have taken the marketing to a very different level. Apple believes in creating a different set of needs, i.e. if you want to click photos in the midnight and of a moving object and of a group. Who says mobile phone is for telecommunications? 

For most of us, marketing is hard-core selling and informing customers about your product. But after understanding the course in detail, you will know that marketing is all about understanding the opportunity and make the best of it. In order to become a better marketing person, one needs to have a clear understanding of the concepts. These concepts will help you create your story. The marketing orientation is making sure that you have created your story with the best narrative and you haven’t missed anything. 

Along with the marketing orientation, some other ingredients like luck, courage, drama, glitter, imagination, zeal and timing can also become handy in order to be successful or survive. But you have to be doing this better than others. At the end of this course, you shall have an in-depth understanding of marketing planning process and you should be able to develop your own strategies. 

Marketing is an integral part of any business. Why should anybody be in business? Profit is a legitimate goal of a business organization. (Meenakshi, 2011). This comes from selling products and services to the customer. Marketing is all about creating a customer. 

Marketing is an important function of management. The first thing which marketing emphasis on that the successful businesses revolve around identifying and meeting human and social needs. Human needs because they are buying goods and services and society because they are responsible for its betterment. When Google recognized that people needed to more effectively and efficiently access information on the internet, it created a powerful search engine that organized and prioritized queries. When IKEA noticed that people wanted good furnishings at substantially lower prices, it created knockdown furniture. (Kotler, 2017, p. 5). 

As defined by Philip Kotler, marketing is all about "managing profitable customer relationships". 

Going back to stories, to make profitable relations with the customers’ stories can be made around basic routine purchase also. Goals of marketing work on two simple ideologies. The framework of these ideologies revolves around the dilemma of change vs. traditional. 

The subject of value can be very subjective. Though people want new and exciting things by default they are reluctant to come out of their comfort zone. Motivating them to try a new product can be challenging. The first ideology is to attract new customers by offering them superior value than existing products. Let's discuss the example of Moov. When Reckitt Benckiser Group came with this fast pain relief formula, they had a very tough competition from GSK's Iodex; however, they were able to gain immediate attention from consumers as they argued their superior position of being effective and unlike Iodex, not being messy and sticky. 

The consumers will embrace change faster if it is in the expected setting. 007 has to be essentially British, Sean Connery is Scottish, Roger Moore was British, Pierce Brosnan is Irish and Craig Denial is British. Marketers are expected to take the role of Q and provide their customers with the gadget like Q does to 007. The other ideology is to keep and grow current customers by delivering satisfaction. Iodex was quick after the launch of Moov and came up with a better non-messy formula for their brand. Raymond is another company that is keeping and growing customer satisfaction from last nine decades. Many other companies like ICICI, Taj Group of Hotels and Sony have consistently been the first choice of its customers. They have become a synonym for the product category they serve. 

Hence marketing can be defined as a set of activities that are required for a firm to establish, grow and maintain value leadership.