CHAPTER 1
Marketing: Managing profitable customer relationships
Marketing is managing profitable customer relationships. The goal of marketing is to attract new customers, to grow current customers by delivering satisfaction and to provide goods and services at profit.
Marketing specialists must satisfy their customers’ need in a socially responsible and ethical manner

The marketing process 1. Understand the marketplace and customer needs and wants
Humans have 3 needs * Physical needs (food, clothing) * Social needs (the need to belong) * Individual needs (need for knowledge, self expression) Based on their needs, human have wants that are shaped by culture and individual personality. However, when backed by buying power, wants become demands

Marketing offers: As a marketer, we offer the product (the physical need) and the service (that provides a benefit)

A market is the set of actual and potential buyers of a product. These buyers share a particular need or want.

Marketers are not the only doing marketing- even consumers do marketing when they search for the goods they need at a price they can afford.

Elements of a modern marketing system:
Suppliers
[ Company
Competitors
Marketing
Intermediaries
End
User
] 2. Designing a customer-driven marketing strategy
Marketing management is the art and science of choosing target markets and building profitable relationships with them
To have a good marketing strategy we need to be able to answer two questions: * What customers will we serve? (what’s our target market) * How can we serve these customers best? (what’s our value proposition)
*To decide who we will serve we need to divide the market into segments (market segmentation)

*To serve the customer best, the marketer needs the show how the product is better than any other product on the market.