The concept of marketing

In order to satisfy needs and desires, marketing provides solutions and answers, which makes it a crucial idea in human life. Particularly with the present use of media and the internet, it is where information on the items and services offered is found. Along with understanding and generating demand, marketing involves creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that are valuable to society, partners, clients, and customers. Marketing isn't just about making sales and selling things. It's also about understanding and generating demand (American Marketing Association).
After customers, distributors, and suppliers work together, a process of identifying offerings with value is what marketing is concerned with. Offerings must be described, and customers must be continually learned from. Delivering is interested in moving the offerings to customers while exchanging involves the trade of value of the offering. All these processes aim at meeting human and social needs, and marketer realizes a profit from it. According to Peter Drucker (1973), marketing creates a bond between buyers and sellers by cautioning seller to understand what the buyer needs and then creates the offering. In such relationship, selling plays a minimal role in the marketing process. However, the possibility of having a perfect product offering is not economically possible as people have different perceived needs and different tastes. Additionally, selling is not the most important step in the marketing process and instead it is a final positive outcome of a successful marketing effort.

Marketer’s main objective is to stimulate demand as described by McCarthy and Perreault (2002) to involve product, promotion, place, and price (Marketing four Ps). The marketer of offers goods and services promotes through them communication between potential buyer and marketing, places the product by offering it in a channel of distribution and sets the prices which are an exchange process. In marketing, one has to analyze the current and potential market opportunities, formulate market strategies, decide on the marketing mix, as well as create and implement a marketing plan. Marketing is involved with finding the right product for the customer through holistic marketing concepts (Achrol & Kotler, 2012). Firms cannot focus on selling process only as the customer has a choice of a product the best satisfy their perceived need and want. For this reason, a marketer must create an offering and deliver it creatively at the right time to achieve a competitive edge (Levitt, 1960).

Holistic marketing is one of the methods to evade marketing myopia. Marketing myopia occurs where a firm takes a shortsighted approach to marketing and see it as a mere tool for selling products instead of looking at it from a customer point of view (Levitt, 1960). For instance, Levitt found that buggy whip industry was thriving in manufacturing horse-drawn carriage until Henry Ford came in and it declines to extinct. The company was focused on itself as buggy whip companies selling buggy whips instead of viewing itself as a transportation company which could conform to products and services needed in emerging transportation industry. However, by using holistic marketing, the firm develop, design and implement its unique marketing programs where the target market scope and interdependencies are recognized. The process of holistic marketing adopts all factors that are important in marketing and integrate them into its processes. As the word Holistic means complete or whole, holistic marketing recognizes multiple perspectives and includes all complexities of marketing activities. It looks at performance marketing, internal marketing, integrated marketing and relationship marketing as means to adapt to the market place and marketspace changes (Achrol & Kotler, 2012).

Through marketing myopia, firms have been unable to solve the complexity of the current marketing mix. According to Philip Kotler, firms should consider the new four Ps as people, processes, programs, and performance where people take center stage in decision making. Myopic marketing does not overlap and blend the marketing tasks through creativity to achieve marketing goals. Improvement of the current offering, innovation enhancement and building of long-term market relationship is one of a comprehensive approach to fight marketing myopia (Gallo, 2016). In holistic marketing, the firm encompasses all its consumer-directed activities including the four Ps and other marketing activities such as social media which is not in traditional view of marketing.

Holistic marketing counters myopia marketing by introducing long-term and sustainable goals for an organization. The failure of a business to see identify what it is doing to its customers by providing value preposition result in marketing failure. Levitt (1960) found that value is key in the new and current concept of marketing. Value determines the total sum of benefits realized by the buyer. It is what the customer gets after purchasing and consuming a product offered by a firm in the market. For this reason, it is the buyer who measures the value and not the seller. Technology has come to provide additional influence to the customer in the marketing process, and firms have to understand this new reality to realize profitability. By avoiding marketing myopia, firms would focus on customer's satisfaction. Through satisfaction, there is fulfillment, loyalty and positive word-of-mouth review on the product or service experience. Higher customer satisfaction results in increased level of perceived value (Oliver, 1980)



References

Achrol, R. S., & Kotler, P. (2012). Frontiers of the marketing paradigm in the third millennium. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 40(1), 35-52.

American Marketing Association. (n.d) Definition of marketing. Retrieved from https://www.ama.org/

Drucker, P. F. (1974), Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices.

Gallo, A. (2016, August 22). A refresher on marketing myopia. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2-5. Retrieved from https://libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/login?auth=CAS&url=http://search.ebscohost.com/logi n.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=118701930&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Levitt, T. (1960). Marketing myopia. Harvard business review, 38(4), 24-47

McCarthy, E. J., & Perreault, W. D. (2002). Basic marketing: A global-managerial approach. (14th ed). Homewood, II. McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

Oliver, R. L. (1980). A cognitive model of the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction decisions. Journal of marketing research, 460-469.