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10 Truths About Marketing After the Pandemic

• Janet Balis

There’s no going back to the old normal.

The Covid-19 pandemic upended a marketer’s playbook, challenging the existing rules about customer relationships and building brands. One year in, there’s no going back to the old normal. Here are 10 new marketing truths that reveal the confluence of strategies, operations, and technologies required to drive growth in a post-Covid-19 world.

It’s safe to say that 2020 was a year like no other and that 2021 will certainly not revert back to the old normal. So, as marketers think about building brands during this year and beyond, what should we take away from the pandemic? What can we do to help companies grow faster? And how is marketing being redefined in the age of Covid-19?

• Janet Balis leads EY’s consulting professionals in the Americas focused on the customer agenda and revenue growth, including commercial excellence, customer experience and product innovation and also leads EY’s CMO practice. She has also served as a partner at Betaworks, publisher of The Huffington Post, and EVP Media Sales and Marketing at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Balis is on the global board of the Mobile Marketing Association and the International Television Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she is also an advisor to the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative. You can follow her on Twitter: @digitalstrategy.

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The Top 5 Marketing Challenges Expected Globally in 2024, And How to Overcome Them [Data + Expert Tips]

Published: November 28, 2023

2023 was a whirlwind.

For one, there were the enormous strides in AI that resulted in massive shifts across the marketing industry. (Many marketers compare AI innovations to the industrial revolution . No big deal or anything.)

Besides AI, there have been massive shifts in how content ranks on search engines due to Google's new EEAT search ranking factors .

Consumer buying behavior has changed drastically, as well, with an increasing number of consumers turning to social media to shop. In fact, Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X actually prefer finding products on social media over any other channel.

As we approach 2024, it's critical to pause for a moment and reflect on the biggest challenges marketers feel they faced this year.

Below, let's review the current global marketing issues impacting the industry, according to data from HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report (coming January 2024) and insights from marketing experts.

Or jump to whichever top challenge you're most curious about:

• Facilitating sales and marketing alignment
• Hiring top talent
• Knowing the social issues your audience cares about 
• Creating content that generates leads
• Gaining and keeping followers on social media

Top Challenges Marketers' Faced in 2023, Ranked — Plus, Expert Insights on How to Navigate Those Challenges in 2024

1. facilitating strong sales and marketing alignment.

Strong sales and marketing alignment is critical for any successful organization. And yet, it's undeniably challenging to facilitate strong communication to help these two teams work better together.

Which is why a whopping one-third (35%) of marketers say a lack of effective communication between sales and marketing is their top challenge.

Why It's a Challenge

Many sales and marketing teams work in silos at larger organizations. Bridging the gap between the two teams — particularly when those teams have different priorities and are unclear of their shared goals — can be difficult, especially when neither team feels motivated to do so.

Additionally, the two teams might implement separate data and analytics processes, making it hard to share data consistently and retrieve insights that help both sales and marketing determine what's working and what isn’t.

But alignment is critical to your business' success in 2024. Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams see 27% faster profit growth , and 36% higher customer retention .

What You Can Do

To explore how you can foster stronger sales and marketing alignment, I spoke with Monica Elgemark , Chief Marketing Officer at Oneflow .

She told me, “To address this challenge, it's imperative to define clear goals and objectives that both sales and marketing teams can rally behind. Clear goals and objectives that differentiate between awareness and revenue should be considered in order for both sales and marketing to understand the values different campaigns bring. It is a mutual dependency between these areas that needs respect.”

Beyond identifying shared goals, Elgemark emphasizes the importance of transparent communication between teams. Regular meetings and collaboration tools are helpful, but they're just that – tools. To truly facilitate alignment, your team needs to implement and continuously nourish a collaborative culture.

Data plays a key role, as well. As Elgemark puts it, “Sharing data and analytics represents an essential facet of this alignment process. Implementing a robust customer relationship management (CRM) system, accessible to both teams, allows for the exchange of invaluable customer data. This data not only informs marketing strategies but also empowers sales teams to better comprehend and engage with leads.”

Finally, Elgemark encourages marketers to seek out feedback from the sales team. Ask your sales team about the quality and readiness of your leads, which will ultimately help you hone in on the marketing activities that drive the most revenue for the business.

2. Hiring Top Talent

The strength of your marketing team starts and ends with the talent you employ.

While it's one of the most important components of a strong marketing team, it’s also one of the most challenging aspects.

In fact, when it comes to hiring, 35% of marketers report finding candidates with the right skillset is their top challenge.

2023 saw some major challenges when it came to hiring. For one, there was higher demand for skilled workers, which led to higher wages and benefits for workers and increased competition among employers to attract top talent.

Additionally, many employees have shifted their priorities and now seek out companies with strong work-life balance and company culture. Many also prefer the option for remote or hybrid work. If your organization doesn't offer these benefits, you’ll likely find it harder to attract top talent.

These challenges will continue to infiltrate hiring and retention in 2024.

HubSpot's Senior Recruiter Kaleigh Hoffman told me a strong partnership between the hiring managers and talent acquisition team is critical for attracting top talent iA 2024.

She says, "A recruiter’s best email or InMail message is never as flattering as direct outreach from a hiring manager, so if you are willing to write a personalized note — it really goes a long way. During a time when AI is making it easier and faster to write anything, personalized outreach can make the difference in someone responding or not. If you are writing to a 'rockstar' candidate, keep in mind that they want to know why you are reaching out to them, so be sure to include why you are interested in their profile, specifically."

Hoffman adds that specific job profiles with clearly defined attributes will help set your job descriptions apart from others in the market, which might skew more general. 

It's important to remember that recruiting is similar to selling. So, as Hoffman puts it, "If you are speaking with a strong candidate, specifically asking them what they are excited about or looking for in their next role can help you close them in later conversations. Reminding candidates of their motivators in final conversations — whether it’s benefits, flexibility, or something else — can really help seal the deal." 

Hoffman adds that its important not to get too discouraged if a candidate decides not to pursue a role. Instead, look at rejection as an opportunity to ask that candidate if they have anyone else in their network they think could be a good fit for the role. 

As Hoffman puts it, "Recruiting is a long-term initiative. Nurturing the relationships you develop by checking in from time to time is a great way to build a pipeline of super-talented candidates for 2024 and beyond."

3. Knowing the Social Issues Your Audience Cares About

Consumers want brands to be socially responsible — in fact, 45% of people think that brands need to do more to advocate for social justice issues.

The brands that take a stance on social issues that matter to their audience will have an easier time connecting with their prospects and customers. People want to buy from brands that care about things that matter to them.

Consider Warby Parker. I've been purchasing sunglasses from Warby Parker for years. I won’t go anywhere else. Why? Because of their Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program, which donates one pair of glasses per pair bought and, to date, has distributed over 10 million glasses.

Roughly one-third (28%) of marketers say their biggest challenge is a lack of information on the social causes their target audience cares about (e.g. environmentalism, racial justice).

Simply put, it can be difficult to discern which social causes matter most to your target audience. This information is a little more nuanced than age, gender, or location.

Additionally, you want the cause to align with your brand values. Your audience might care deeply about climate change, but that cause might not have a natural connection with your brand personality. To authentically connect with your audience around social issues, it's critical that they make sense for your business, as well.

Like most marketing activities, the key to success here lies in market research. 

You'll want to conduct thorough research to better understand your customers on a deeper level – including what they value most. 

Surveys can be strong opportunities to explore these more nuanced conversations with your buyer persona and understand what matters to them. However, people aren't always going to feel comfortable sharing the social issues they care most about, since they are often very personal.

In these cases, leveraging social listening tools to glean insights into the social issues your audience discusses the most on social media could be a strong first step. 

HubSpot's Manager of Community Strategy & Operations Jenny Sowyrda told me, "My number one tip for understanding what your community values is to listen to your community. Your community is telling you what they care about through every interaction — from clicking links in an email to re-sharing a social post."

Sowyrda adds, "Additionally, you should actively listen by connecting with your community members directly. Start a list of members, both the loudest and the quietest folks in the room, and build trust with them through individual conversations focused on learning what they care about. By combining your understanding of your community members with your unique expertise, you can provide value and cater to their needs."

Once you've determined what your community values, you'll want to figure out which social issues overlap with your brand. Authenticity here is key, and so is action. For instance, perhaps you consider partnering with a non-profit that also supports that social issue to show you're willing to walk the walk. Again, ensuring the social issue makes sense for your brand to support is critical, as well.

Patagonia is a good example here. Their brand emphasizes the importance of environmental sustainability, and it works because a) the social issue is a good match for Patagonia's target audience (active, outdoors-y people), while also aligning well with their brand values; and b) they've invested in environmental and social responsibility programs to demonstrate a true, genuine desire to create change. 

4. Creating Content That Generates Leads

24% of marketers say their top challenge is creating content that generates leads . And yet, it's one of the most important functions of marketing: To ensure the content we create is high-quality, but also impacts the company’s bottom line.

In 2024, we'll see some major changes when it comes to marketers’ content creation strategies.

Creating lead-generating content has always been a challenge for marketers, but there are some particular reasons why it's especially difficult now.

In 2023, Google released its new EEAT search quality evaluator guidelines. Why is this significant? Because they added an “E” for experience — which means now, ensuring your content is written by someone with credible, first-hand experience on the topic is vital for increasing your website's value.

AI also greatly transformed how people consume content. Now, people don't have to Google “How can I go viral on TikTok?” — then can ask an AI chatbot. Which means many marketers likely saw major decreases in traffic on some of their more generalized topics in 2023.

AI and EEAT have greatly shifted how we, at HubSpot, create lead-generating content . We've been working to ensure the topics we cover are written by authors with first-hand experience.

We've leaned into personality-driven content, since personality is one thing AI doesn’t have.

And we've begun re-focusing our overarching strategy on more niche topics that pertain directly to our products and services, rather than covering too many broad topics — since a brand that is an expert on “everything” is likely actually an expert on, well … nothing.

To learn how you can create strong lead-generating content in 2024, I spoke to Zack Khan , the Co-Founder of Feathery and former marketing leader at Hightouch.

He told me, “The challenge and opportunity in 2024 is writing quality content with insights from subject matter experts. There is so much low quality content out there, increased by AI writing tools. The novel ideas and voice ('hot takes') that generate leads require a deep connection to the reader's problem that the content is hoping to solve.”

During Khan's eary days at Hightouch, he solved for this challenge by hiring "data evangelists". These were people in Slack communities who were already sharing their opinions on the latest data trends. Khan recognized the importance in arming himself with writers’ who could share personal insights, rather than simply summarizing the data.

He says, “The hardest part was hiring the right team of subject matter experts, and getting them excited to write content full-time. I expect this to be just as hard to find in 2024. But audiences are starving for unique, opinionated content in 2024 and the work to recruit a team of subject matter experts does pay off”.

Monica Elgemark believes another key strategy to generating leads in 2024 involves leveraging AI. As she puts it, “A creative and holistic approach is essential for generating traffic and leads. AI-powered personalization delves deeper than surface-level marketing. Using AI algorithms, marketers can predict and cater to individual prospect interests, and create personalized content that resonates profoundly with the target audience.”

Elgemark also encourages marketers to consider how they might incorporate more interactive content — like quizzes, assessments, or webinars — into their existing strategies to retain traffic and provide additional value.

Elgemark promises: "By delving into these strategies, marketers can confidently navigate the dynamic landscape, remain at the forefront of trends, engage effectively, and ultimately thrive in the ever-evolving realm of B2B marketing." 

5. Gaining and Keeping Followers on Social Media

Nowadays, your audience spends a large portion of their time on social media. And yet, social media is also more oversaturated than ever before.

Which leads us to our fifth challenge: Gaining – and keeping – followers on social media.

18% of marketers report it's a major challenge for them to gain and keep followers on social media.

This makes sense: Time is precious. Each social media user is going to be selective when it comes to which brands they follow. If they don't feel they’re getting consistent value from your social media content, they'll quickly unfollow to free up their feed for other users’ content.

Amrita Mathur , VP of Marketing at ClickUp , symphasizes with this challenge and recognizes the importance of audience-building in 2024 and beyond.

Her solution to social media is simple, and yet oftentimes underutilized: Leverage the power of your employees as influencers.

She told me, “While so far, I’ve mostly seen brands working with influencers and creators to further their message and cause, I can see company employees turning into these influencers.”

She continues, “Brands need to recognize that there is no tried-and-tested playbook that works every single time. In my opinion there is one single truth: the answer lies in having a point of view, and knowing how to illustrate that POV in a striking and memorable way. When you combine this and couple it with tactics for both first time and repeat engagement, you get magic. That repeat engagement is what will turn into buying behavior down the road (assuming product-market fit).”

As she points out, the word 'influencer’ can make some marketers believe their internal employees don't make the cut. But influencers can be big or small, niche or broad, and they can also be channel-specific (like Instagram alone) or not.

Mathur adds, “If you haven't already, start thinking about which employees to leverage, curate their unique voice, and get on with the building of your modern-day media strategy.”

Logan Lyles , Evangelism & Content Marketing Manager at Teamwork.com , agrees with Mathur that incorporating 'evangelists' — including executives, employees, customers, influencers, and partners — into your marketing activities allows you to surround existing audiences with content from people they already trust. 

He told me, "Our strategy has involved co-creating content with influential names in the community of our ICP (agencies & professional service firms), as we tap them to guest on our podcast and speak on our Agency Life webinar series.  We've even partnered with different evangelists to both create and distribute our pillar content pieces via social media."

Here's a quick example of that strategy in action on LinkedIn , where Pete Caputa provided a reaction to data points from Teamwork.com's State of Agency Operations Report and then posted the video Teamwork.com and Pete created together on his personal LinkedIn profile.  

Lyles told me Pete's personal post generated nearly 200 combined engagements & comments — well beyond the engagement metrics Teamwork.com typically sees on an average Company Page post.

Navigating Challenges in 2024 and Beyond 

Ultimately, there is no easy solution to these complex, nuanced challenges.

Hopefully, these expert insights can get your team inspired and motivated to test out new strategies in 2024, iterate on existing strategies, and explore the best opportunities for your unique brand to combat these challenges. 

Remember -- you're not in this alone! 

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in November 2012 and has been updated annually to include new, exclusive HubSpot data and expert insights. 

Don't forget to share this post!

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Essay on Marketing

Students are often asked to write an essay on Marketing in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Marketing

The world of marketing.

Marketing is about spreading the word on products and services. It helps companies connect with customers.

Understanding Customers

Creating products.

Using customer insights, businesses develop products that solve problems or bring joy.

Communication is Key

Marketing involves telling people about products through ads, social media, and more. Clear communication is crucial.

Building Brands

Adapting and growing.

Marketing strategies change based on feedback. Companies adapt to stay relevant and successful.

Marketing is like sharing stories that connect what people need with what companies offer. It’s an exciting way to make products part of our lives.

Also check:

250 Words Essay on Marketing

Understanding the power of marketing.

Marketing: a concept that shapes the modern world. It’s more than just ads and promotions; it’s the engine driving business success. Let’s explore its significance.

The Essence of Marketing

Segmentation and targeting.

Not everyone is interested in the same thing. That’s where segmentation comes in. It divides the vast market into smaller groups with similar traits. Then comes targeting – aiming your efforts at those segments most likely to respond positively.

Value Creation through Branding

Branding isn’t just a logo; it’s the emotions and perceptions associated with a product. Strong brands build trust and loyalty, allowing companies to command premium prices.

The Digital Revolution

The digital age has revolutionized marketing. Social media, search engines, and online ads allow for precision targeting and personalized communication. It’s not about bombarding, but about engaging.

Content is King

Analyzing and adapting.

Marketing isn’t a one-shot deal. It’s a constant process of analyzing results and adapting strategies. Tools like analytics help track what works and what doesn’t, leading to informed decisions.

Ethics in Marketing

The bottom line.

In a nutshell, marketing is the bridge that connects what you offer with those who need it. It’s not just about selling but about creating lasting value. Understanding its principles can propel businesses toward success in the modern world.

500 Words Essay on Marketing

Marketing: connecting the dots for successful business.

Marketing is like a magical thread that weaves businesses and customers together, creating a world where products and services find their perfect match. In this modern age, new-age techniques like Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR), Chatbots and Conversational Marketing, Programmatic SEO , Social Commerce, and Neuromarketing have added exciting dimensions to this field. Let’s delve into the basics of marketing and explore how these techniques have transformed the way businesses reach out to us.

Imagine you’ve baked the most delicious cookies in town. You want everyone to know how tasty they are. That’s where marketing comes into play. Marketing involves all the activities that help you promote and sell your products or services. It’s about understanding what people want, creating something they’ll love, and then letting them know it exists.

Meeting New Friends: Customers and Businesses

In the world of marketing, two important players dance together: customers and businesses. Customers are people like you and me who need things. Businesses are the ones that make those things. Marketing helps these two groups find each other.

Traditional vs. Modern Marketing

Getting found: seo.

Think about searching for something online. How often do you go past the first page of search results? That’s why businesses use SEO. It’s like making sure your cookie recipe appears at the top when someone searches for “delicious cookies.” This technique helps businesses get noticed by improving their online visibility.

Understanding Your Brain: Neuromarketing

Ever wondered why some ads just stick in your head? Neuromarketing dives into how our brains respond to ads. Businesses use this technique to create ads that connect with us on a deeper level. It’s like making sure your cookie commercial triggers happy thoughts every time you see it.

Chatting with Businesses: Conversational Marketing

Have you ever had a chat with a robot on a website? That’s Conversational Marketing. Businesses use chatbots to talk to us, answer our questions, and even help us choose the right products. It’s like having a helpful assistant while shopping.

Shopping in Your Pajamas: Social Commerce

Putting it all together.

Marketing is like a puzzle where every piece matters. Businesses create amazing products, use modern techniques like VR/AR, Chatbots, Programmatic SEO, Social Commerce, and Neuromarketing to make us notice them, understand us better, and make shopping a breeze.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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More From Forbes

Current marketing challenges and the solution to overcoming them.

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We all know each industry has its particularities in all senses. Marketing is not an exception. These unique characteristics lay the foundation for most organizations’ challenges. However, there are many challenges that belong to the moment we’re in. Regardless of your market, your type of product or your competitive situation, these challenges are common to most marketing departments.

Challenge 1: Omnichannel Distribution

If you haven’t done some digitalization within your business, you’re already late. Digital transformation is neither a fad nor a need anymore. Digital is the standard that gave birth to omnichannel, and with it, the inability to define a clear customer journey. The question is: Do we really need it?

While marketers keep trying to entertain segments of one, why would you want to define the erratic path of many? Consider this: If you work with nine marketing touch points, you have 362,880 (give or take) possible customer journeys. Do you really think you can figure it out?

Challenge 2: Catching The Attention

In a world of overinformed and media-bombarded customers, how can you get your target’s attention? Well, this is not really the challenge. If you are fighting for attention, it means that you are not interesting. Your customers and potential customers are not looking for you; you are trying to appear on their radar. That’s the real challenge: to become interesting rather than being an attention-grabber.

Challenge 3: Proving Marketing ROI

Old, less-demanding communication metrics such as opportunity to see (OTS), gross rating point (GRP), purchase intent, Net Promoter Score (NPS), etc., are out of date, or at least out of the scope of attention of the rest of the organization beyond the marketing department.

When was the last time, if ever, that you reported these types of key performance indicators (KPIs) to your CEO or general manager? Was any financial, business-related decision ever made based on that information? How many times were you asked the dreaded question: “What’s this marketing campaign going to contribute to the business?”

You know the answer is a real return on investment (ROI). But you may not know either how much or how to calculate it in a credible way.

The Solutions

The curious matter is that the answer to all these challenges is the same but seen from different angles: value.

Marketers and businesses have gone from a product-centric management model to a client-centric one. The customer is the center of everything, and everything is aimed at satisfying customer needs. But which needs, and at what cost?

We all know it is difficult to define the customer journey — they buy everywhere in an unpredictable order. Each customer has (and expects to satisfy) their own particular needs. Filling the needs of massive segments of customers is a daunting task, if not impossible.

The answer to managing omnichannel sales is not in the customer journey but in the value generation. Value for whom? For the customer and for the company. Same word but different meanings. The only way you can figure out what value means for your customers and potential customers is through quantitative — not qualitative — research. And the only way to define value for the business is by knowing the actual economic contribution of marketing to its bottom line (ROI).

On the other side, looking at the second challenge, in order to become interesting, you also need to generate value for your clients and potential clients. The only way your customers are going to “look for you” and what you have to say is if it generates value for them.

This value doesn’t necessarily come only from the actual purchase or use of your product or service; it also comes from the other issues and experiences that are important to them (society, environmental, etc.). How are you doing in those terms? Are you building social equity through your marketing and business activities? Are you somehow contributing to healing environmental damage? Becoming interesting equals generating value.

We all know marketing generates real economic value. To define that value, marketers keep showing metrics that do not report real economic figures. What’s the value of your NPS for the CFO when it comes to defining your marketing budget? How does purchase intent help your CEO choose alternative investments? For the few marketers who go a step beyond showing some return figure, is this amount based on some sort of secret algorithm from your media supplier or on an estimation? Does your CEO or chief financial officer believe in it?

For those who make an extra effort to prove marketing ROI, I have good and bad news. The good news is that it can be calculated in a robust, credible way. The bad news is that it requires marketing departments to build their own attribution models. There’s no way out. Businesses that use predefined attribution models (such as time decay, last click, etc.) will generate an entropic indicator that is useful only to the marketing department, as the rest of the organization will not believe in it.

To build their own attribution model, marketers need to isolate two things: the number of acts of purchase that have been impacted by the marketing campaign, and the influence of the campaign on the decision-making process of buying customers. The first one can be done through a wide variety of traceability tools. The second one requires quantitative research again — you can use the same research to define value and the influence of marketing in customers’ decision-making processes.

Summarizing, the solution to the most pressing marketing challenges relies on good research to define value for the customers and on building your own robust, credible attribution model to define value (ROI) for the business.

Regardless of your industry’s particularities, marketers need to do something to overcome these challenges in order to avoid a slow but steady decline into obsolescence.

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Top Marketing Problems and Solutions: How to Strategically Combat Issues

In the world of marketing, there are a lot of innovative and creative campaigns that help businesses achieve great results. But an industry as vast and expansive as advertising also allows space for problems to arise. If you’ve experienced (or are currently experiencing) issues, you may feel like your troubles are unique. Take heart! You’re definitely not the only person — or company — going through digital marketing woes. 

Several situations have proven consistently tricky for many branding and marketing agencies all over the world. The COVID-19 pandemic was the stem of some of these issues like hiring, but others are just typical problems that many advertising agencies experience simply because they work in the marketing industry. 

We’re going to explore some of the most common types of situations that marketers find themselves facing, what solutions you can implement, signs that problems are occurring (even if you may not see it) and how a strong and set marketing strategy can help any agency avoid falling into the trap of common complications. 

Ready to get started? Let’s dive in!

Common Marketing Problems You May Be Facing

The worst possible response to marketing problems is to freak out. First, you must understand that this is, sadly, much more normal than you’d expect. There are certain obstacles nearly everyone in the industry encounters at one time or another. 

Before diagnosing a situation, you should start by figuring out if it’s a marketing problem or a business problem. Although advertising agencies are called to fix marketing problems, if you do a deep dive into what’s going on, you may actually discover that it’s a problem connected to the business. 

• Business Problems: Any hurdle, situation or variation that leads to a difference between the desired objectives and actual accomplished results is a business problem. This type of issue can’t be solved with more marketing. For example, if your message isn’t connecting with the intended audience, saying it louder or more frequently isn’t going to fix anything. You’ve heard the saying “putting lipstick on a pig,” right? Well, dressing up your business with marketing when the inherent problem is much deeper than that won’t do a thing. 
• Marketing Problem: If you don’t have a business problem inhibiting your efforts from being effective, then you most likely have a marketing problem. This type of issue can be defined as any factors in a campaign that affect the results you may be looking for, like a lack of strategy, a bad understanding of your target audience or unengaging social media posts. These are the types of problems that we’re going to discuss today. 

So, what are the most common types of marketing or advertising challenges? Here are a few examples that many companies experience: 

Recruiting Talent

During the shutdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses had to adjust how they run their business , and marketing was no different. Now that the recovery and revival of “normal” is taking place, some agencies have found that hiring and keeping employees is a difficult task to undertake. The HR managers put much effort to make  team extension  as quality and profitable for their business as possible. 

Talented marketers are often in high demand, making recruiting and maintaining an accomplished staff an issue. Many marketing professionals have found ways to offer their staff benefits and positive work experiences including more flexibility, educational opportunities and higher salaries. 

Lack of Clear Strategy

About 50% of companies using digital marketing have no plan or strategy in place for their efforts. This is a problem because if you don’t know why and how you’re doing something, it will most likely not yield helpful or beneficial results. Having a plan of attack for all things, from email marketing and content creation to website design and social media, will enable you to make informed decisions and will most likely deliver you the outcomes you’re hoping for. 

With a marketing strategy you can:

• Find your target demographic.
• Create SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely) goals.
• Keep your team on the same page.
• Be timely. 
• Make your brand more authentic.
• Ensure brand awareness.

No Alignment With Buyer Personas

If marketers don’t know who they’re creating content for, then it will be difficult to effectively communicate with them. No industry is the same, meaning that every audience that is being targeted has specific needs that should be met, and tones of voice and language choices that resonate with them. If you aim at nothing, you’re sure to hit it.

Another common sector of buyer persona problems is shooting for the wrong group of people. Trustmary found that 80% of content marketing is targeted at the wrong audience . Basically, a marketing team could have the best possible creative work to send out, and a great marketing plan to execute, but if it’s given to the wrong people, it won’t land properly. 

Showing ROI

Often, when a company experiences financial hardships, the first thing to be cut is marketing spend. The reason for this might be that proving its value can be difficult without specific tactics in place to do so. Hubspot’s State of Marketing Report found that demonstrating the return on investment (ROI) of marketing activities to be the No. 1  roadblock for marketers . 

When done correctly, marketing does offer a boundless supply of benefits for companies. But if you can’t specify what the impacts of advertising efforts like market research, email campaigns or social media marketing are to upper management or clients, it’s going to be difficult to continue producing quality work. 

You have probably found yourself knee-deep in one of the situations above, but there are solutions to these problems. Continue reading to learn what you can do to help yourself and your clients get the results you’re hoping to achieve. 

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Effective Solutions for Bumps in the Road

For every marketing problem, there’s a solution. Some issues might take more effort than others, but all fixes require strategic thinking and research to fully understand where the problem stems and what the best steps forward are. Let’s look specifically at the challenges we listed above:

How to Fix Your Recruiting Practices

There are loads of ways to make your current employees happy as well as bring in new talent, but we’re just going to talk about a few. First, ensure your marketing team is heard and satisfied by adding feedback channels in the workplace. This could be a digital platform that collects remarks, or could be a physical version in your office. Either way, make sure your employees know their thoughts are valued by actually giving them the ability to share.

Word of mouth is everything nowadays. If your employees share that they’re happy on social media platforms like LinkedIn, or if they speak positively about your company with their friends and family, more people will be prone to apply to your open positions. And, you’ve hired your team for a reason — pay attention to who they think would be a good fit for the business. 

Creating a Clear Strategy

A set strategy is vital for consistent and effective marketing, but that doesn’t mean it’s a breeze to build. Let’s break down the process for creating a marketing strategy :

• Define Your Goals: Have your target objectives in mind before you start creating any advertising content. This can make sure your hard work is going to serve a specific purpose and will help you have an end goal to aim for. 
• Think of Your Audience: Understand and highlight who it is that you’re trying to reach. Every industry and type of business speaks to very unique people, meaning that your marketing initiatives must work for your target audience. Create buyer personas to help you visualize the set group of customers as you work.
• Build Brand Messaging: Since you’re speaking to your specific audience, ensure that they can recognize and pick out your brand from the competition using a set tone and voice. 
• Research Your Competitors: You should never ever copy what your competitors are doing — you bring a unique voice to the market. But, it’s smart to pay attention to what other brands are bringing to the table. 

Once you go through the process of creating your marketing strategy, you’re off to the races! 

Mending Your Buyer Personas

Finding a solution for your either lack of or incorrect target audience comes from having a clear marketing strategy, which we’ll get into more later. After you create your strategy for all marketing and advertising efforts, you should understand who it is that you’re trying to reach. With that knowledge, you can ask yourself the following questions before creating any content:

• Is my customer really interested in this?
• Will they actually care about this topic or information?
• What needs am I meeting or problems am I solving for my target audience?
• Is there a better way that I could connect with my audience?

If you’re confident in your answer, go ahead and interact with your buyers! And if you’re not? It may help to create buyer personas — model people who match your ideal customers. Give him or her a name, a detailed description and think about them every time you’re working on a component of your marketing. This can help you cut generalizations about who you’re creating content for, and be more specific and focused on the right group of people. Then you can create inbound marketing to attract these people and build more brand loyalty. 

Better Prove Your ROI

Your digital marketing efforts should be full circle, meaning that you should always end up with actual results and data that you can either determine successful or not. Without the power of marketing and sales working together, it’s really difficult to calculate ROI. Discover how much impact your content actually had on your target audience by looking at data points like impressions, qualified leads, web traffic, conversion rates and actual sales. After checking over the relevant information, compare those numbers to the specific goals that you’d made prior to creating the content. 

Did you meet your objectives like you’d hoped? We hope so! Either way, it’s time to put those numbers into a dashboard that can be easily displayed and read by your clients or upper management. By showing the impact of the advertising procedures you followed throughout the project timeline, you’re better able to discuss and prove the work was worth it and made a difference for your clients. 

Maybe none of these issues are things that you’ve experienced — so you think. But what if problems are occurring that you’re unaware of? If that’s the case, you could be losing money or potential customer partnerships without even knowing it. Want to learn more about how to know if you’re flying blindly into challenges? You’ve come to the right place. 

Tell-Tale Signs That You’re Experiencing Issues

We sincerely hope your marketing efforts are going well, but if they’re not, we want you to be aware. Here are some common red flags that you may be missing with your current advertising:

• Email Unsubscribes: This happens pretty normally, but not at alarmingly high rates. If you’ve had a drop-off in subscriber numbers, it’s probably because the content may be irrelevant or targeted toward the wrong people. This could also be a sign to check in on your email marketing platform to ensure your leads and contacts are being handled correctly. 
• Wrong Audience: Have people been clicking on your organic listings without converting? Maybe it’s time to reassess your messaging and brand personas. 
• Ad-Heavy: We’ll say it very loudly: Paid advertising isn’t bad! But, if you’re solely relying on it to be noticed by any members of your audience, then you should consider creating meaningful content that can draw more organic traffic to your brand. 
• Losing Followers: Similar to email subscribers, if you’re seeing a large dip in social media followers lately, it could be smart to reassess your social media marketing strategy. Although this is a common marketing problem, it can be more serious than some understand.

How Strategy Can Safeguard Your Marketing Practices

We’ve talked a lot about strategy, and that’s because it’s super important to find success with your brand. 

To ensure your marketing is strategic, you must create goals that your efforts can adhere to. And, to pinpoint objectives you need to do a bit of research. Here are the key elements of a brand strategy:

• Value Proposition: A simple statement that summarizes why a customer would choose your product or service over the competition.
• Key Brand Messaging: Set tone, language and values that articulate how your brand sounds and speaks to your audience.
• Target Customers: The specific audience that your product or service is aiming to please, as well as the competition that you’re battling.

Also described as the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place and promotion. Having these factors defined can help your team align to achieve specific goals, tie your efforts to business objectives, identity and test what resonates with your target audience and helps you stay up-to-date and capitalize on emerging technological and cultural trends. 

Although these marketing problems are common, they don’t have to be inevitable. Avoid the above issues (and any unlisted situations) and find success by efficiently recruiting, defining your strategy, targeting the right people and proving your ROI. 

Madelyn Gardner

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Madelyn Gardner is a content writer based in Nashville, Tennessee. Off the clock, she loves being outside, hiking, reading, baking and eating Mexican food — specifically burritos.

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What Is a Marketing Essay

The definition of marketing essay describes it as a written piece, exploring product promotion in detail. Such pieces entitle authors to conduct research, study terms, and argumentation. Writing process engages cognitive abilities as well as analytical and critical thinking. While writing, students educate themselves and improve skills in writing and argumentation.

Creating a competent scholarly piece about commerce is always challenging for young authors. College kids should read various data sources and select credible ones. Data must be organized and structured beforehand. Presentation of data, argumentation, as well as reasoning also add many problems for authors. Such papers must be written in compliance with requirements following strict guidelines.

Free Marketing Paper Examples to Download

Website offers countless marketing essay examples of any size and complexity. Browse through a wide selection of topics, opinions, and formats. Each pdf sample is available for free with no registration. All papers were donated by former students. They demonstrate unique approaches to tackling this uneasy task.

Use these text samples as a source of inspiration, guidance, or templates. Extract wording, argumentation techniques, and convincing tactics. Reading sample pieces before writing brings fresh marketing essay ideas. Example articles present perfect language, strong structuring, and smart narration.

Learn new storytelling tricks and perfect personal writing skills by copying selected articles. Look how other students managed to create memorable, well-designed, researched pieces. You may need a human resource management essay; find it in our library. Apply new knowledge in custom papers – boost overall quality and final grades.

Marketing Reflective Essay Examples

A marketing reflective essay challenges authors with critical assessment and taking an analytical look. In reflective pieces, students demonstrate in-depth subject understanding as well as superb writing skills. Such qualities can be achieved either by time-consuming learning or by copying successful papers. Proposed examples demonstrate sublime knowledge of both the article's subject and vocabulary. Here’s how even one reading session of a free marketing essay pdf example can change a student’s style:

• Improved wording, incision

Learn new topic-specific vocables for a big improvement in morphological variability as well as readability.

• Better paper structuring

Check out modern effective methods or text design for more narrative consistency and coherency.

• Thorough informational support

Examine how each statement is backed up by credible information from trustworthy data sources.

Marketing Analysis Paper Examples

Marketing analysis essay takes it further. Similar papers consist mostly of critique and researched material. Students demonstrate extensive academic knowledge and analysis skills. Writing process starts with subject studying and reading competent data sources. A good author must design a clean structure. Create a diverse plan that’ll allow for in-depth coverage. Paper must be kept informative yet captivating. Readers should be entertained and eager to read more.

If you’re short on marketing paper ideas, read proposed paper samples. Articles were donated by students who got the highest scores for these pieces. They present a wide variety of possible topics and analytical approaches. Check out business essays and what made these works great in analysis quality and data presentation. Try indirectly copying smart tricks as well as effectively improving personal writing skills. Make your writing excellent!

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• Design an outline. Plan narration by creating an article’s structure. Specify which data is mentioned and where. Follow this outline while writing.
• Make drafts. Write two-three versions of your article. Each one will be closer to perfection. After you’re satisfied with the achieved results, do the next step.
• Edit mistakes out. Proofread an article to eliminate spelling errors, grammar faults, and word repetitions. Check for plagiarism to be sure your article is unique.

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Great Marketing Essay Topics Ideas

Want more assistance with finding new marketing topics to write about? The chance of creating an interesting scholarly piece significantly improves if the topic is fascinating. Select such a topic in marketing that you’d be eager to share thoughts. With that said, here’s a list of great paper subjects:

• How can consumers protect themselves from viral advertisements?
• Direct sell or a hidden call-to-action? Describe pros/cons of each approach.
• Explore effective methods of selling a bottle of water to a drowning man.
• Online product promotion as a part of modern retail strategies.
• Explain how advertisements can be more effective on social media.
• Business model of TikTok – analyze it in detail.
• How can a company create its image and earn clients’ loyalty?

Hint: Marketing is closely related with communication. So, browse more than one essay on communication in our database. 

Topics Related to Marketing

Picking one of marketing related topics instead of purely market-targeted gives additional possibilities. Students get a wider variety of arguments and more abilities to showcase particular knowledge. Subject-related articles develop cognitive skills as well as teach the concept application. We’ve compiled some marketing paper topics that are not entirely about marketing:

• How can kids improve revenues of a lemonade stand?
• Now people are products big companies buy/sell.
• Where to find the best customer for your business? (Consult: essay about business management .)
• Explore first forms of advertisement in Ancient Rome.
• Small entrepreneur struggles of the 21st century.
• How symbols are used in advertising/selling?
• Who was Steve Jobs – market genius or a fraud?
• Instagram and TikTok as the best platforms for selling stuff.

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Numerous free essays on marketing and related subjects are available to any internet user. The website offers countless options for each student to select the right paper sample. Download them as pdf files or examine free samples online. Use these free papers to improve personal grades and perfect writing abilities.

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Essay on Marketing: Top 9 Essays on Marketing

Essay on‘Marketing’. Find paragraphs, long and short term papers on ‘Marketing’ especially written for school and college students.

Essay on Marketing

Term Paper Contents:

• Essay on the Challenges and Opportunities of Marketing

Essay # 1. Introduction to Marketing:

ADVERTISEMENTS:

Marketing is everywhere. Everything from presenting yourself for a job interview to selling your products includes marketing. Main objective of any company is to gain profits which can be achieved only through marketing of the products. Marketing enables the companies to create demand and earn profits. If these two aspects are not taken care of, then the company will not survive in the market.

“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers, and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.” – (American Marketing Association)

“Marketing is a social process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.” – (Philip Kotler)

Thus it can be safely said that a company reaches its customer through marketing and communicates to them about the products and services offered by the company.

ADVERTISEMENTS: (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Essay # 2. Evolution of Marketing :

In earlier days, an organization was mainly concerned with production of goods. It used to believe on mass production and paid less or negligible attention on quality of the product and the customer’s demand.

After some time, the focus of organization shifted from production of the product to the sale of the product. The concept of marketing emerged gradually in 1970’s after the production and sales era. It took many years for organizations to realize that a customer is the key for making profits in the long run. The marketing concept is evolved through various stages.

These stages are explained below:

1. Production Era :

The production era began with the Industrial Revolution in the 17th century and continued till 1920s. Say’s law – Supply creates its own demand – was applicable in this era. The demand for products was more than the supply in the market; thus, it was a seller’s market. In the production era, the main aim of an organization was to manufacture products faster and at low prices. In this era, customers were concerned only about the availability of products and no importance was given to features and quality of products.

2. Sales Era :

The sales era came into existence in 1920s and continued till the mid of 1950s. This era was marked by the great depression of 1923. The depression proved that manufacturing products was not everything because the sale of the products was also important for organizations to earn profit.

Thus, the need for developing promotion and distribution strategies emerged to sell products. The organizations started advertising their products to increase their sales. Many organizations created specialized market research departments to collect and analyze the prevailing market data.

3. Marketing Era :

The sales era merely focused on selling the goods and ignored the consumers’ needs and demands. The year 1970 marked the advent of marketing era. In the marketing era, organizations realized the importance of customers and started designing the products as per customers’ needs.

Therefore, the marketing era led to the development of customer-centered activities over the production and selling activities. Organizations came up with different techniques, such as customer survey, to collect and analyze data for understanding the customer’s expectations, needs, and wants.

ADVERTISEMENTS: (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Essay # 3. Approaches to the Study of Marketing:

The meaning of marketing is different to different people. In common parlance, marketing is the process of selling something at a market place. To a salesman it means selling whereas to an advertising manager it means advertising. To some it means the study of individual commodities and their movement in the market place, to some others marketing means the study of institutions and persons who move their products or study of the economic contributions.

Thus, there are different approaches to the study of marketing:

1. Commodity Approach:

The commodity approach focuses a specific commodity and includes the sources and conditions of supply, nature and extent of demand, the distribution channels used and the functions, such as buying, selling, financing, advertising storage etc. various agencies perform. Prof. Paul Mazur defined as “the delivery of a standard of living to society. Prof. Malcolm McNair expanded the definition to “the creation and delivery of a standard of living”.

2. Institutional Approach:

The institutional approach focuses on the study of various middlemen and facilitating agencies.

3. Functional Approach:

The functional approach considers different kinds of functions recognized for their repetitive occurrences and necessarily performed to consummate market transactions. Converse, Huegy and Mitchell define marketing as the “business of buying and selling and as including those business activities involved in the flow of goods and services between producers and consumers.” American Marketing Association, perhaps, gives more factual or descriptive definition. It defined marketing as the performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from producer to consumer or user.

4. Managerial Approach:

The managerial approach concentrates on the decision making process involved in the performance of marketing functions at the level of a firm. Howard, Phelps and Westing and Lazo and Corbin are the pioneers of the managerial approach.

5. Societal Approach:

The societal approach consider the interactions between the various environmental factors (socio-logical, cultural, political, legal) and marketing decisions and their impact on the well- being of society. Kotler, Feldman and Gist, were the main proponents of the societal approach.

6. Systems Approach:

The systems’ approach is based on Von Bartalanffy’s general systems theory. He defined system as a “set of objects together with the relationships among them and their attributes”. This approach recognizes the inter-relations and inter-connections among the components of a marketing system in which products, services, money, and equipment and information flow from marketers to consumers that largely determine the survival and growth capacities of a firm.

7. Modern Concept:

The new managerial awareness and desire reflected in the consumer orientation for all all-out commitment to the market consideration and to connect all marketing operations to the consumer needs has given birth to a new operational concept. Felton views the marketing concept as “a corporate state of mind that insists on the integration and coordination of all marketing functions that, in turn, are welded with all other corporate functions, for the basic objective of producing maximum long-range corporate profits.

According to Kotler, the marketing concept is a customer orientation backed by integrated marketing aimed at generating customer satisfaction as the key to satisfying organizational goals. According to McNamara,” marketing concept is … a philosophy of business management, based upon a company- wide acceptance of the need for customer orientation, profit orientation, and recognition of the important role of marketing in communicating the needs of the market to all major corporate departments”.

Lazo and Cobin describe marketing concept as ” the recognition on the part of management that all business decisions of a firm must be made in the light of customer needs and wants; hence, that all marketing activities must be under one supervision and that all activities of a firm must be coordinated at the top, in the light of market requirements”. King has given one of the most comprehensive descriptions of the marketing concept. He defined it as, “a managerial philosophy concerned with the mobilization, utilization and control of total corporate effort for the purpose of helping consumers solve selected problems in ways compatible with planned enhancement of the profit position of the firm”.

These definitions suggest that marketing is only concerned with the movement of goods and services from the plant to the consumer. This is thus a production-oriented definition more appropriate for a sellers’ market and dangers in case of buyers’ market. In fact, marketing is related with the sophisticated strategy of attempting to offer what the consumer may want and at a profit.

ADVERTISEMENTS: (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Essay  # 4. Objectives of Marketing:

According to Peter F. Drucker, “Marketing means such a perfect understanding of the customer that the product fits him totally and sells itself. Marketing would result in a customer who is ready to buy all that, what should be needed then is to make the product available.”

Organization’s marketing strategies are designed in tune with various marketing objectives.

The objectives of marketing aim at:

1. Creating demand for the products by identifying the needs and wants of customers. The consumers get familiar with the usage of products through different promotional programs, such as advertising and personal selling. This helps in creating demand for the products by the customers.

2. Increasing the market share of the organization. The marketing efforts, such as promotion, create the product awareness in the market. The product awareness helps in capturing the reasonable share in the market by organization.

3. Building the goodwill of the organization in the market. Every organization tries to earn reputation in the market by providing quality goods to the customers. It builds its goodwill by popularizing products supported by advertising, reasonable prices, and high quality.

4. Increasing profits and achieving long-term goals through customer satisfaction. All the marketing activities revolve around the customer. These activities fulfill the organization’s long-term goal of profitability, growth, and stability by satisfying the customer’s demands. All the departments, such as production, finance, human resource, and marketing, coordinate with each other to fulfill the customer’s expectations keeping the maximization of profit as the focus.

Essay # 5. Marketing Process:

Marketing Process —– The marketing process is one that invol­ves the following chain of business activities:

1. Identification and study of the desires, needs, and requirements of the^ consumers;

2. Testing the validity of the consumers’ reaction in respect of product features, price, distribution outlets, new product concepts, and new product introduction;

3. Matching the consumers’ needs with the firm’s offerings and capa­bilities;

4. Creating effective marketing communications and programmes with emphasis on lower price, mass distribution channels and mass advertising to reach numerous market segments so that the consumers know about the product’s availability; and

5. Establishment of resource allocation procedures among the various marketing components like sales promotion, advertisement, distribution, product design, etc. 

Outline of functions in the Marketing Process : In order to place the goods in the hands of the consumers, an integrated group of activities is involved in marketing. Marketing functions cover all those activi­ties which are required for the journey of goods from the producer to the consumer. Goods require some preparations, undergo many operations and pass several hands before they reach the final consumer.

In consideration of the above factors, Clark has divided the modem marketing process into three broad categories as under:

(i) Concentration

(ii) Dispersion

(iii) Equalisation.

These are explained below.

1. Concentration – In a marketing process, concentration is that business activity in which the goods flow from many manufacturers/producers toward a central point or market. If we think of international trade, we find that the customers of a particular corporation or firm world reputation are scattered in different countries and even located thousands of miles, away, and the products are transhipped to points accessible to than. Similar scene is found even in the case of national trade. With the development of trade and commerce, the efforts in the direction of concentration acti­vity have to place more stress on the functions like collection, storage, transportation and inventory of goods in the central markets, and processing of customer’s orders. In addition, the aspects of financing and risk-bearing are also to be taken into consideration.

In India, the concentration activity is undertaken by the Governments at the Central and State levels. Food example, The Food Corporation of India undertakes this activity in case of grains, rice, sugar, etc.

2. Dispersion – In a marketing process, dispersion is that busi­ness activity in which the goods flow from the central locations to the final consumers. The wholesalers and retailers play a great role in this activity. This activity involves many other supporting activities like classification, gradation, storage and transportation of goods. The func­tional aspects of finance and risk-bearing need important considerations.

In India, the agencies like The State Trading Corporation of India, The Minerals and Metals Trading Corporation of India, and The Food Corpora­tion of India undertake this dispersion or distribution activity in respect of certain specified goods. Sane large scale manufacturing companies have, of late, undertaken this activity as a part of their marketing activities.

3. Equalisation – In a marketing process, equalisation refers to the adjustment of supply to demand on the basis of tint, quality, and quantity. This process helps to maintain the state of equilibrium between the forces of demand and supply. The primary responsibility of a business unit towards the consumers and customers is to make available the right products of right qualities at the right tine, in right quantity, at the right place and at the right price. The equalisation activity can serve these objectives.

Essay # 6. Integrated Marketing Communication Process:

Marketers operate is a very dynamic environment characterised by changing customer needs and wants, severe competition, changing process technology, advancements in information technology, government regulations, etc. That is why, they are adopting Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC).

Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) involves integration of company’s various communication channels to deliver a clear, consistent and compelling message about the company and its products and brands. Most of the companies communicate with target customers by using promotion tools like advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations and direct marketing. Through each of these tools, some message is transmitted to the target customers. IMC calls for careful blending of these promotional tools to ensure effective communication.

Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) requires developing a total marketing communication strategy that recognises that all of a firm’s marketing activities (not just promotion) communicate with its customers. Everything a marketer does sends a message to the target market.

The EMC approach is an improvement over the traditional approach of treating various promotional activities as totally separate. It helps to develop the most suitable and effective method to contact customers and other stakeholders.

Often different tools play different roles in attracting, informing and persuading target customers. These tools are carefully coordinated under IMC so that they provide the same clear and consistent information about the company and its products/brands.

IMC leads to a total marketing communication strategy aimed at building strong customer relationships by showing how the company and its products can help customers solve their problems. It ties together all of the company’s messages and images.

The company’s television and print advertisements have the same message, look, and feel as its e-mail and personal selling communications. And its public relations materials project the same image as its Website or social network presence.

Communication Process:

Definition of Communication:

The term ‘communication’ is derived from the Latin word ‘communis’ which means common. That means if a person communicates with another, he establishes a common group of understanding. According to Newman, Summer and Warren, “Communication is an exchange of facts, ideas, opinions or emotions by two or more persons”.

Communication does not mean merely sending or receiving message. It involves understanding also. It is, in fact, a bridge of meaning and understanding between two or more people. Thus, communication is a two- way process.

The salient features of communication are as follows:

(i) Communication involves at least two persons—one who sends the message and the second who receives the message.

(ii) Communication is a two-way traffic. The process of communication is not completed until the message has been understood by the receiver. Understanding is an essential part of communication, but it does not imply agreement.

(iii) The basic purpose of communication is to create an understanding in the mind of the receiver of information.

(iv) Communication may take several forms, e.g., order, instruction, report, suggestion grievance, observation, etc. The message may be conveyed through words spoken or written, or gestures.

Elements of Communication:

Communication is a process involving exchange of facts, viewpoints and ideas between persons placed in different positions in the organisation to achieve mutual understanding as shown in Fig. 11.5. The communication process starts when the sender or communicator has a message communicate to some other person known as receiver. It will be completed when the receiver gets the information and sends feedback to the communicator.  

The essential elements of communication are described below:

(i) Sender or Communicator:

The person who conveys the message is known as communicator or sender. By initiating the message, the communicator attempts to achieve understanding and change in the behaviour of the receiver. In case of marketing it is the marketer (sender) who starts the communication process.

(ii) Message:

It is the subject-matter of any communication. It may involve any fact, opinion or information. It must exist in the mind of the communicator if communication process is to be initiated. In marketing, the marketer’s message relates to product, price and place.

(iii) Encoding:

The sender of information organises his idea into a series of symbols (words, signs, etc.) which, he feels, will communicate to the intended receiver or receivers. This is called encoding of message. Communication may take place through physical gestures also.

(iv) Media or Communication Channel:

The communicator has to choose the channel for sending the information. Communication channels are the media through which the message passes. It may be either formal or informal. In marketing, media may be salespersons, advertisement and publicity.

(v) Receiver:

The person who receives the message is called receiver. The communication process is incomplete without the existence of receiver of the message. It is the receiver who receives and tries to understand the message. The receiver in case of marketing is the prospective or present customer.

(vi) Decoding:

After the appropriate channel or channels are selected, the message enters the decoding stage of the communication process. Decoding is done by the receiver. Once the message is received and examined, the stimulus is sent to the brain for interpreting, in order to assign some type of meaning to it. It is this processing stage that constitutes decoding. The receiver begins to interpret the symbols sent by the sender, translating the message to his own set of experiences in order to make the symbols meaningful.

(vii) Response:

Response refers to the set of reactions that the receiver has after being exposed to the message. In case of advertising, a response may mean developing a favourable attitude towards the product as a result of an advertising campaign. However, in many cases, measuring such responses is not easy.

(viii) Feedback:

Communication is completed when the communicator receives feedback information from the receiver. The feedback may reveal that the receiver has understood the message. It may also contain information about the action taken by the receiver on the basis of message sent by the communicator. Thus, feedback is the backbone of effective communication.

(ix) Noise:

Noise is a very common thing we observe in our day-to-day interaction with others. At times it affects adversely the effectiveness of communication. For example, if a person is talking over the phone to another and there is a noise around him, he will feel great difficulty in listening to the person at the other end of the phone. Even the noise can affect the voice of the sender of the message.

Hurdles or Difficulties in Marketing Communication:

There are four factors which might create hurdles or problems in communication between the marketer and the target customer.

These hurdles include noise, selective attention, selective distortion and selective retention as discussed below:

Noise is a sort of interfering sound in the communication process anywhere along the way from the sender to the receiver and vice versa. It can be sound of running bus, two persons talking close at hand or someone shouting around. Noise of any kind has the potential of creating disruption or barrier to effective communication. The sources of noise can be both internal and external. Noise within the office can be controlled, but it is very difficult to control the external noise.

Noise is one of the biggest obstacles in marketing communication. For example, a driver’s need to provide safety to the traffic sidetracks the role of billboards, banners, etc. during disturbed weather conditions —wind, dust storm, rain, etc. Similarly, too much advertisement exposure during the day of purchase of tyre for a car, would disturb the planned purchasing.

These constitute noise in the communication process. The level of noise may not allow a customer to receive the message as intended. The effectiveness of communication depends upon the level of congruity and compatibility between different elements of the communication.

(ii) Selective Attention:

A person may be exposed to hundreds or thousands of ads or brand communications in a day. Because a person cannot possibly attend to all of these, most stimuli will be screened out. This process is called selective attention. Because of this, the marketers have to work hard to attract consumer’s notice. Generally, people are more likely to notice stimuli that relate to a current need.

Thus, a person who is motivated to buy a car is most likely to notice car ads. The process of selective attention explains why advertisers make extra efforts to grab the audience’s attention through fear, music, or bold headlines.

(iii) Selective Distortion:

Selective distortion is the tendency to interpret information in a way that fit one’s perception. Consumers often distort information to be consistent with prior brand and product beliefs. Thus, the target audience will hear what fits into their belief systems.

As a result, receivers often add things to the message that are not there and do not notice other things that are there. The advertiser’s task is to strive for simplicity, clarity, interest and repetition to get the main points across.

(iv) Selective Retention:

People retain in their long-term memory only a small fraction of the messages that reach them. If the receiver’s initial attitude towards the brand is positive and he rehearses support arguments (that is, tells himself things such as the product is in fashion or that it is reasonably priced or that it delivers good value, etc.), the message is likely to be accepted and have high recall.

If the initial attitude towards the brand is negative and the person rehearses counter arguments (that is, tells himself that the product is highly overpriced or that the competing products offer more value to customers or that the brand is not doing well in the market, etc.) the message is likely to be rejected but to stay in long-term memory.

Thus, the advertiser’s task is two-fold here. He not only has to create an initial favourable attitude towards the brands but also through his ads communicate to the audience strong points about the brands so that the customers can rehearse the same and the brand is positively placed in the long-term memory of the customers.

Essay # 7. Role of Marketing in Economic Development :

In today’s era of globalization role of marketing is increasing to fulfill different needs and requirements of people. Due to increase in scale of production and expansions of markets, producers need support of marketing tools to distribute their goods and services to the real customer.

High competition in market and product diversification has increased the marketing activities like advertising, storage, sales promotion, salesmanship etc. Now high profits can be attained by high sales volume and good quality of products and services. Marketing has acquired an important place for the economic development of the whole country. It has also become a necessity for attaining the objective of social welfare and high quality of life.

The importance of marketing can be explained as under:

(a) Importance of Marketing to a Firm:

Marketing is considered to be the prime activity among all the business activities. Success of any business depends on success of marketing. Peter F. Drucker has rightly said that, “Marketing is the business.” Objective and goals of any organization can be achieved through efficient and effective marketing polices. The success of an enterprise depends to a large extent upon the success of its marketing activities.

The importance of marketing to the firm can be explained as under:

1. Marketing in Business Planning and Decision Making:

Marketing research is helpful in searching opportunities and potential in market. It is necessary for an organization to decide what can be sold before deciding that what can be produced. Unless and until these key decisions are taken, it is not practical to take the decisions regarding production, quality of product, type of product and quantity of production etc.

Marketing is very helpful in taking all such decisions therefore its plays an important role in business planning. Marketing provides valuable information regarding production policies, pricing policies, advertisement and sales promotion policies of competitors, so that a suitable policy may be formulated by the top management.

2. Increase in the Profits:

The main objective of every firm is to increase the profitability by successful operations of its activities. Maximization of profits can be possible only through the successful operations of its activities. Marketing department need the help of other departments as well for discharging its duties successfully, marketing department coordinate with other departments like finance, production, to fulfill the needs of customers and regular supply according to market demand.

3. Flow of Marketing Communication:

Integrated marketing communication makes it possible to flow marketing information to intermediaries, publics and customers. Marketing acts as a medium of communication between the society and the firm. Various information regarding trends, needs, attitudes, fashions, taste preferences etc., are collected by marketing department.

(b) Importance of Marketing to the Society:

1. To Uplift Standard of Living:

Ultimate objective of marketing is to produce goods and services for the society according to their needs and tastes at reasonable prices. Marketing discovers the needs and wants of the society, produces the goods and services according to their needs, creates demand for these goods and services encourages consumers to consume them and thus improves the standard of living of the society. By advertising utility and importance of products and services are communicated to the people.

2. To Decreases the Total Marketing Cost:

Next important responsibility of marketing is to control the cost of marketing. Distribution cost and production cost can be decreased by creation of high demand in market. Decrease in cost of production will have two impacts, firstly the high profitability of organization and secondly to increase in the market share of the firm.

3. Increase in the Employment Opportunities:

Marketing provides direct and indirect employment in society. Employment opportunities are directly related with the development of marketing. Successful operation of marketing activities requires the services of different enterprises and organizations such logistics, warehousing, transportation, retailing finance, etc.

4. In controlling Business Fluctuations:

Business fluctuations like recession and depression causes unemployment, and deflation. Marketing helps in protecting society against all these problems. Marketing helps in innovation and discovery of new markets for the goods, modifications and alterations in the quality of the product and development of alternative uses of the product. It reduces the cost of production and protects the business enterprise against the problem of recession.

5. Increase Per Capita Income:

Marketing operations create, maintain and increase the demand for goods and service. Marketing activities flow money from one part of economic system to other. By generation of new employment opportunities it helps to increases income of people.

(c) Importance of Marketing in Economic Development:

Marketing plays an important role in the development of a country. Most of developed countries like USA, Japan, and Germany are having strong marketing system, they are moving towards global marketing. Industrial growth and development need support of marketing, large scale of production requires new markets. In these countries, the production exceeds the demand it need marketing system to be much more effective so that the produced goods and services can be sold.

Marketing has a vital role to play in the development of an underdeveloped and developing economy. In developing economies the industrialization and urbanization is increasing at a faster rate and so the importance of marketing is also increasing as it is required for selling the produced goods and services. A rapid development of underdeveloped economy is possible only if the modern techniques of marketing are used in these countries marketing activities are increasing at a fast rate in developing countries.

Essay # 8. Importance of Marketing :

Role of Marketing in a Firm :

Efficient marketing management is a pre-requisite for the successful operation of any business enterprise. A business organisation is differentiated from other organisations by the fact that it produces and sells products.

The importance of marketing in modern business is discussed below:

Marketing is the beating heart of the business organisation. The chief executive of a business cannot plan, the production manager cannot produce, the purchase manager cannot purchase, and the financial controller cannot budget until the basic marketing decisions have been taken. Many departments in a business enterprise are essential for its growth, but marketing is still the sole revenue producing activity. Marketing function is rightly considered the most important function of management.

Marketing gives top priority to the needs of customers. Quality of goods, storage, display, advertisement, packaging, etc. are all directed towards the satisfaction of customer.

Marketing helps in the creation of place, time and possession utilities. Place utility is created by transporting the goods from the place of production to consumption centres. Time utility is created by storing the goods in warehouses until they are demanded by customers. Possession or ownership utility is created through sale of goods. The significance of marketing lies in the creation of these utilities to satisfy the needs of the customers and thereby earn profit. It a firm is able to satisfy its customers, it will have better chances of survival and growth even in the fast changing environment.

Marketing generates revenue for the business firm. Marketing is an important activity these days, particularly in the competitive economies. Marketing generates revenue for the business enterprises. No firm can survive in the long-run unless it is able to market its products. In fact, marketing has become the nerve-centre of all human activities.

Role of Marketing in the Economy :

Marketing plays a significant role in the growth and development of an economy. It acts as a catalyst in the economic development of a country by ensuring better utilisation of the scarce resources of the nation. Since a business firm generates revenues and earns profits by its marketing efforts, it will engage in better utilisation of resources of the nation to earn higher profits.

Marketing determines the needs of the customers and sets out the pattern of production of goods and services necessary to satisfy their needs. Marketing also helps to explore the export markets.

Marketing helps in improving the standards of living of people. It does so by offering a wide variety of goods and services with freedom of choice. Marketing treats the customer as the king around whom all business activities revolve. Besides product development, pricing, promotion, and physical distribution of products are carried out to satisfy the customer.

Marketing generates employment for people. A large number of people are employed by modern business houses to carry out the functions of marketing. Marketing also gives an impetus to further employment facilities. In order to ensure that the finished product reaches the customer, it passes through wholesalers and retailers and in order to perform numerous jobs, many people are employed.

On the whole, marketing leads to economic development of a nation. It increases the national income by bringing about rise in consumption, production and investment. It mobilises unknown and untapped resources and also facilitates full utilisation of production capacity and other assets. It helps in the integration of industry, agriculture and other sectors of the economy. It also contributes to the development of entrepreneurial and managerial talent in the country.

Essay # 9. Challenges and Opportunities of Marketing:

A large number of changes have taken place in the recent years which have influenced the field of marketing as discussed below:

1. Globalisation :

The term ‘globalisation’ means the process of integration of the world economy into one huge market through the removal of all trade barriers or restrictions among countries. In India, restrictions on imports and exports and inflow and outflow of capital and technology have been lifted by the Central Government so that Indian business may become globally competitive.

The broad features of globalisation are as follows:

(i) Free flow of goods and services across national frontiers through removal or reduction of trade barriers.

(ii) Free flow of capital across nations.

(iii) Free flow of technology across nations.

(iv) Free movement of human resources across nations.

(v) Global mechanism for the settlement of economic disputes.

The aim of globalisation is to look upon the world as a ‘global village’ which would allow free flow of goods, capital, technology and labour between different countries. Because of globalisation, there has been a tremendous impact on marketing strategies of business firms, particularly engaged in international marketing. They have to design product, price, promotion, place or distribution strategies to meet the challenges of global marketing.

2. Information Technology (IT) :

Information technology has enabled real-time access and sharing of digital information through digital networks, information database, and computer graphics. It has brought about many changes in the business landscape.

Electronic technology has facilitated purchase and sale of goods and services electronically. E-Commerce can be used not only to market product, but also to build better customer relationships. Thus, marketers are facing new challenges as regards booking of e-orders, e-deliveries of intangible products, receiving e-payments and Customer Relation Management (CRM).

3. Increased Leisure Time :

As a result of shorter working week, vacations, and labour-saving devices available for domestic use, most wage-earners now enjoy more leisure time. So there has grown a market for articles used for recreational purposes to enjoy the leisure time. In the developing countries also, cinema shows, holiday trips, sports and games have come into importance.

4. Changing Role of Women :

Throughout the world more and more women are taking up jobs and have gained economic independence to a large extent. They accept even challenging jobs. They also exert greater influence on buying decisions of their families. It may happen that husband buys a commodity according to the decision of the wife. This has necessitated special study of the buying motives of the working women.

5. Demand for Services :

Over the years, consumers’ demand for services is on the rise as in case of tour and travel, educational, medical, repair and maintenance services, etc. Due to growing complexity, business firms also need expert services like accounting, taxation, advertising, customer care, etc.

6. Increased Competition :

Business has become more competitive these days and this has brought about many changes in the field of marketing, e.g., product differentiation, competitive pricing, competitive advertising, customer support services, etc.

7. Social Emphasis :

Marketing is now concerned with the long-term health and happiness of consumers and well-being of society. Marketers in are getting involved in improving the quality of life of consumers and preventing or minimising the evil effects of environmental pollution on the society by practising green marketing.

Emerging Concepts in Marketing :

1. Social Marketing:

It refers to the design, implementation, and control of programs seeking to increase the acceptability of a social idea, cause, or practice among a target group. For instance, a recent publicity campaign for prohibition of smoking in Delhi explained the place where one can and can’t smoke in Delhi.

2. Relationship Marketing:

It is the process of creating, maintaining, and enhancing strong value-laden relationships with customers and other stakeholders. For example, British Airways offers special lounges with showers at many airports for frequent flyers. Thus, providing special benefits to valuable the customers to strengthen bonds will go a long way in building relationships.

To achieve relationship marketing, a marketer has to keep in touch with the regular customers, identify most loyal customers to provide additional services to them, design special recognition and reward schemes, and use them for building long-term relationships.

3. Direct Marketing:

It means marketing through various advertising media that interact directly with consumers, generally calling for the consumer to make a direct response. Direct marketing includes Catalogue Selling, Mail Order, Tele computing, Electronic Marketing, Selling, and TV Shopping.

4. Service Marketing:

It is applying the concepts, tools, and techniques, of marketing to services. Service is any activity or benefit that one party can offer to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything. Services may be financial, insurance, transportation, banking, savings, retailing, educational or utilities.

5. Non-Business Marketing:

Marketing is applied not only to business firms but also to non-business organisations. Voluntary institutions are adopting principles and practices of marketing to promote their ideologies, schemes and programs among the target groups.

Related Articles:

• Essay on Marketing: Top 5 Essays | Marketing Management
• Essay on Sales Promotion: Top 4 Essays | Functions | Marketing Management
• Marketing Features: 4 Major Features of Marketing – Explained!
• Difference between Marketing and Selling

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Essay on Marketing

List of essays on Marketing. Marketing is a comprehensive term and it includes all resources and a set of activities necessary to direct and facilitate the flow of goods and services from producer to consumer. Businessman regards marketing as a management function to plan, promote and deliver products to the clients or customers. Human efforts, finance and management constitute the primary resources in marketing.

Audience : This essay is written in easy and simple words for school, college and university students.

List of Essays on Marketing for School, College and University Students

Essay on marketing   – (1500 words).

Marketing is a comprehensive term and it includes all resources and a set of activities necessary to direct and facilitate the flow of goods and services from producer to consumer. Businessman regards marketing as a management function to plan, promote and deliver products to the clients or customers. Human efforts, finance and management constitute the primary resources in marketing.

Marketing starts with identification of customer’s wants and then satisfying those wants through products and services. The modern concept of marketing is customer-oriented and focuses on earning profit through customer satisfaction.

Prof. Drucker states that the first function of marketing is to create a customer or market. Customer is the most important person in the whole marketing process. He is the cause and purpose of all marketing activities.

According to Philip Kotler, “Marketing is a human activity directed at satisfying needs and wants through exchange process.” All marketing activities are basically for meeting the needs of customers and also raising social welfare. We have twin activities which are most significant in marketing- (a) Matching the product with demand, i.e., customer needs and desires or target market, (b) The transfer of ownership and possession at every stage in the flow of goods from the primary producer to the ultimate consumer.

According to William Stanton, “Marketing is a total system of business activities designed to plan, price, promote and distribute want-satisfying products to target markets to achieve organisational objectives.”

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organisational objectives.

Paul Mazur defined marketing as the creation and delivery of a standard of living to society. This definition catches the real spirit of the marketing process. It has consumer- orientation. It duly honours the marketing concept which indicates a shift from product to customer-orientation, i.e., fulfillment of customer needs and desires. It emphasises the major function of marketing, viz., satisfaction of customer and social demand for material goods and services.

Example- In the case of oral care products, currently only 47 per cent of the rural population use toothpaste, 23 per cent use tooth powder and the rest neither. Targeting non-users in rural areas and developing awareness about oral hygiene and converting them to tooth powder/toothpaste users.

Features of Marketing :

1. Marketing activities are aimed at satisfying the needs and desires of consumers and therefore, finding out consumer needs and wants is the starting point for all marketing activities. It starts with consumers and ends with consumers by satisfying their needs.

2. Marketing is a continuous activity and the goods are manufactured and distributed to the consumers as per demand.

3. Marketing deals with exchange of goods and services with money as the medium of exchange.

4. Marketing concept has undergone changes over a period of time i.e., the recent one is the societal marketing concept which focuses on three factors- customer demand satisfaction, public interest and profitability.

5. Marketing creates time, place and possession utilities. The consumer is able to obtain the right product at the right time at the right place as and when he requires.

6. Production and marketing are related and production takes place based on the needs and expectations of the consumer.

7. Marketing facilities large-scale production, employment opportunities and social welfare.

8. Marketing is an integral part of business. The survival and growth of business depend upon the effectiveness of marketing operations in an organisation.

9. Marketing is an integrated process and is based on strategies and plans.

10. The long-term objective of marketing is profit maximization through customer satisfaction.

Modern marketing begins with the customer, not with production, sales, technological landmarks and it ends with the customer satisfaction and social well-being. Under market- driven economy, buyer or customer is the king. The marketer should find out what the consumers wish to purchase and how much they are willing to pay. The company should then decide whether the desired product can be produced and sold at the price consumers will pay and at a profit to the company.

Marketing covers the following:

1. Seeking- The purpose of seeking is to discover the customer and customer needs. The marketing opportunity is revealed through an analysis of the environment.

2. Matching- Marketing is a matching process. Customer demand has to be matched with organisational resources and environmental limitations, such as competition, government regulations, general economic conditions, and so on.

3. Programming- The marketing programme, called the marketing mix, covering Product, Price, Promotion and Place (distribution) strategies (4 P’s) will be formulated and implemented to accomplish the twin objectives of customer satisfaction and profitability.

Marketing is an ongoing process of- (1) Discovering and translating consumer needs and desires into products and services (through planning and producing the planned products), (2) Creating demand for these products and services (through promotion and pricing), (3) Serving the consumer demand (through planned physical distribution) with the help of marketing channels, and then, in turn, (4) Expanding the market even in the face of keen competition.

The modern marketer is called upon to set the marketing objectives, develop the marketing plan, organise the marketing function, implement the marketing plan or programme (marketing mix) and control the marketing programme to assure the accomplishment of the set of marketing objectives. The marketing programme covers product planning or merchandising, price, promotion and physical distribution.

Four basic approaches are commonly used to describe the marketing system:

1. Commodity Approach :

Under the commodity approach, we study the flow of certain commodity and its journey from the original producer right up to the final customer. In such a study, we can locate the centre of production, people engaged in buying and selling of the product, mode of transportation, problem of selling and advertising the product, problems of financing it, problems arising out of its storage and so on.

Through such an approach, we can find out the differences in marketing products, services and problems. Thus, we can have a fuller picture of the field of marketing. Marketing of agricultural products such as cotton, wheat, jute represent the commodity approach.

2. Functional Approach :

Under the functional approach, we concentrate our attention on the specialised service or functions or activities performed by marketers. The study of marketing functions (like, buying, selling, storage, risk-bearing, transport, financing, and providing information) represents the functional approach to the marketing system.

3. Institutional Approach :

Under the institutional approach, our main interest centres round the marketing institutions or agencies such as wholesalers, retailers, transport undertakings, banks and insurance companies etc., who participate in discharging their marketing responsibilities during the movement of distribution of goods. We try to find out how these various business institutions and agencies work together to form a total marketing system.

4. The Systems Approach :

A system is a set of interacting or interdependent components or groups co-ordinated to form a unified whole and organised marketing activities to accomplish a set of objectives.

In the model of systems approach we have:

1. Objective,

3. Processor,

4. Outputs, and

5. Feedback.

The system is designed to achieve objectives or goals according to a plan, which provides for the processing of inputs and the discharge of appropriate outputs. The objectives direct the process control monitors the process. Information feedback gives information from internal and external sources and it is the basis for future change in the system.

An open system has its own environment giving the inputs and accepting the outputs. Inputs are processed, producing outputs to meet the objective. The twin objectives of marketing system are customer satisfaction and profitability.

The systems approach provides the best model for marketing activity. It places emphasis on the inputs to the system and the outputs produced. It helps in the determination of marketing and corporate goals, and the development of marketing programmes and the total marketing mix.

Adoption of a systems approach provides a good basis for the logical and orderly analysis of marketing activities. It stresses marketing linkages inside and outside the firm. It emphasises changing environment. It provides a framework for control. It depends on using the right information. Markets can be understood only through study of information.

The output establishes the purpose or objective of a system. The objective is profits through serving the demand of consumers and community. The output of marketing system is sales of goods. Correct inputs must be available to the processor i.e., marketing administration in order to produce desirable outputs.

These inputs in the marketing system are the elements of marketing-mix and the target market determined through marketing research. The marketing system must operate as per plans and policies and within control which may be internal or external. Of course, feedback must be available for introducing corrections in the future plans and marketing operations.

The flow of information required to check performance is called feedback. Feedback ensures the accomplishment of objectives through continuous marketing managerial process of planning-action-control. Marketing environment can be broken down into a number of layers. The inner layers become the subsystems of the outer layer. Output from one layer becomes the input for the next.

Marketing plan is a system and its parts or components are subsystems. There are four components or subsystems of marketing plan or marketing-mix- (1) The product management system to manage products from introduction to market withdrawal, (2) Channel and physical distribution system to manage distribution channels and the flow of goods to the market, (3) Promotion system to coordinate all means of promotion to stimulate demand, and (4) Price system designing prices for a line of products sold to customers under different selling conditions.

Marketing management revolves around these four areas of marketing- mix or plan. Marketing information system provides data for decision-making in all marketing areas or problems. It is also a part of marketing system.

The systems model (plan-inputs-processing-outputs-feedback-environment) placed emphasis on the inputs of resources as per plan, discharge of outputs and marketing information flow. It enables the determination of goals as well as development of strategies and programmes to achieve those goals through feedback control mechanism.

Essay on Marketing – 2 (1000 Words)

Traditionally, marketing has been defined as follows – “Marketing includes all activities that direct the flow of goods and services from the producers to the consumers or users.” This definition is product oriented as it does not consider the needs of the customers. It emphasises sale of goods produced by the producer and thus considers marketing in a narrow sense of ‘telling and selling’.

Modern definitions of marketing are based on the philosophy that “Satisfaction of customers is the basic purpose of business”. According to Philip Kotler, “Marketing is a social process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering and freely exchanging products and services of value with others”.

This implies matching of products with what is demanded in the market. This requires determining the requirements of potential customers and then developing and supplying those products which meet their requirements. If a business produces the products to satisfy the requirements of customers, it is more likely to be successful in achieving its objectives.

Definitions of Marketing :

Traditional Definition:

Marketing is a social process by which products are matched with markets and through which the consumer is able to use or enjoy the product. It makes goods and services more useful to the society by creating place, time and possession utilities. —Cundiff and Still

Modern Definition:

Marketing is a social process by which individual and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering and freely exchanging products and services of value with others. —Philip Kotler

The present day marketing is consumer oriented rather than product oriented. Product planning, pricing, promotion and distribution are so organised that the needs of the customers are satisfied fully. In the words of Stanton, “Marketing is a total system of interacting business activities designed to plan, price, promote and distribute wants satisfying products and services to present and potential customers”. Consumer oriented marketing ensures that all business activities revolve around the customer.

The essential elements of marketing are as follows:

(i) Two Parties:

There are at least two parties – buyer or customer on the one hand, and seller or marketer on the other.

(ii) Exchange of Value:

Exchange of goods and services between the seller and the buyer takes place for a valuable consideration. In other words, the parties have something viewed valuable by each other. That means the buyer can offer value and the seller can offer goods which are perceived to be of value by the buyer.

(iii) Freedom:

The parties are free to interact and accept or reject the offer of each other.

(iv) Satisfaction:

Marketing satisfies the needs of both the parties. The consumers gets want satisfying goods and services and the seller gets value in terms of money for his offering.

Marketing as a Process of Managing Profitable Customer Relationships :

According to Philip Kotler, “Marketing is the process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return.”

Globalisation and rise of information technology (IT) have increased the expectations of customers. They don’t buy products or brands, but ‘a set of benefits or values’. They expect marketers to be concerned with their total satisfaction. The marketers association with the customer continues even after the sale of the product and this is what is called relationship marketing.

Thus, marketing is a process consisting of the following interrelated elements:

(i) Understand the market and customer needs and wants.

(ii) Design the product to satisfy customer needs and wants.

(iii) Develop an integrated marketing program that delivers superior value to the customer.

(iv) Build profitable relationships with, customers and offer ‘customer delight’.

(v) Capture value from customers to create profits and customer equity.

Marketing enables people to satisfy their needs and wants through exchange relationships. Exchange is the act of obtaining a desired product (or benefit) from a company by offering money value in return. Marketing also involves actions taken by the marketer to build and maintain desirable exchange relationships with target customers.

Marketers try to build strong relationships by consistently delivering superior customer value. Besides attracting new customers, they also try to retain the existing customers. These are the two basic goals of modern marketing.

The key to building lasting customer relationships is to create (i) superior customer value, and (ii) satisfaction. A customer buys from the firm that offers the highest customer perceived value, i.e., the customer’s evaluation of the difference between all the benefits and all the costs of a market offering (i.e., product) relative to those of other firms. Many people prefer to buy sweets from Haldiram’s store as compared to other sweet shops because of higher perceived value.

Market and Related Concepts :

Traditionally, the term ‘market’ refers to the place where buyers and sellers meet for exchange of goods and services. It is in this sense that we refer to Chandni Chowk Market, Kamla Nagar Market, Janpath Market and other markets in Delhi. The buyers go to the market to purchase the goods of their choice.

These days the term ‘market’ has acquired a broader meaning. If refers to actual and potential buyers of a product or service, whom the sellers can approach through various means of communication and transport.

For example, a marketer can approach prospective buyers through web advertising and a customer can purchase goods from his residence or office by placing order on telephone or cell phone or using internet and e-mail. Physical meeting between the parties to buy and sell is not necessary.

Customer Needs, Wants and Demands :

Marketing begins with human needs and wants. Needs are feelings of deprivation of some satisfaction. People need food, air, water, clothing and shelter to survive. These needs exist in the very nature of human biology and marketers do not create them. Wants are desires for satisfaction of needs. Human needs are few but wants are many. Human wants are continually shaped and reshaped by families, social institutions and cultural factors.

Demands are wants for specific products and services. They are backed by the ability and willingness to buy. Wants which are supported by purchasing power become demands. Marketers influence wants and demands by making products attractive, affordable and easily available to the target group of consumers. For example, a marketer might promote the idea that a certain brand of pen (e.g., Parker) would satisfy the need for social status.

Essay on Marketing –  3 (700 Words)

Marketing starts with identifying customer needs and wants and ends with satisfying them through a coordinated set of activities that also allows a firm to achieve its own goals. Awareness of this fact gave rise to the marketing concept. The marketing concept embraces all the activities of a firm. It aims at matching the company’s offering with customer needs, to achieve the desired level of customer satisfaction and generate profits for the company.

The marketing concept is based on the beliefs that are as follows:

(a) The company’s planning and operations are customer-oriented,

(b) The goals of the company should be profitable sales volume and not just volume, and

(c) All marketing activities should be coordinated effectively.

Cundiff and Still, “marketing is the business process by which products are matched with market and through which transfer of ownership affected”.

Tousley, Clark and Clark “marketing consist of those efforts which affect transfer of ownership of goods and services and provide for the physical distribution”.

H.L. Hansen Marketing is the process of discovering and translating consumer needs and wants into products and service specification, creating demand for these products and services and then turns expanding this demand.

According to American Marketing Association, ‘marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals.

Marketing is defined as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large”.

The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to a market to buy or sell goods or services. Seen from a systems point of view, sales process engineering views marketing as “a set of processes that are interconnected and interdependent with other functions, whose methods can be improved using a variety of relatively new approaches.”

The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as “the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably”.

Marketing is used to create the customer, to keep the customer and to satisfy the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, it can be concluded that marketing management is one of the major components of business management. It is an integrated process through which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return.

Managerial Definition :

As a managerial definition, marketing is described as “the art of selling products”. But Peter Drucker, a leading management theorist, says that “the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy”.

Traditional and Modern Concepts of Marketing :

Old or traditional concept of marketing was limited up to profit generation by high volume of sales and production of products at a large scale, how to distribute products from producers to customers in an efficient manner. Marketing activities were concentrated toward selling; later on with rise of competition marketers gave more emphasis to promotion activities to increase their market share and profitability. Salesmanship and product promotion were the main part of marketing policy of a business firm.

Modern concept has shifted from selling to customer satisfaction, modern marketing concept aim at how to understand a customer in a better way it is possible by exploring customer’s want and expectations and marketing behaviour. Products manufactured by firms should match with the demand and expectation of customers.

Under marketing concept a customer should be ready to buy the products on his own initiative, how to create demand in market by customer satisfaction is the main essence of modern concept. Now customer is well aware about his rights, quality and customer services, therefore marketing should be customer oriented, a strong communication network is needed to build high brand equity and goodwill in market.

Marketing is an important functional area of business which generates revenues through the sale of satisfying goods and services to the customers. It involves taking decisions in the areas of product, price, place and promotion keeping in view the requirements of the customers business. In this article, the nature of marketing management, implications of modern marketing concept, objectives of marketing, distinction between marketing and selling and also the tools of marketing mix.

Short Essay on Marketing – 4 (400 Words)

Marketing is the process by which companies determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development.

It is an integrated process through which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return.

Marketing is used to identify the customer, to keep the customer and to satisfy the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, it can be concluded that marketing management is one of the major components of business management. The evolution of marketing was caused due to mature markets and overcapacities in the last 2-3 centuries. Companies then shifted the focus from production to the customer in order to stay profitable.

The term marketing concept holds that achieving organizational goals depends on knowing the needs and wants of target markets and delivering the desired satisfactions. It proposes that in order to satisfy its organizational objectives, an organization should anticipate the needs and wants of consumers and satisfy these more effectively than competitors.

Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association AMA as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as “the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.” A different concept is the value-based marketing which states the role of marketing to contribute to increasing shareholder value.

In this context, marketing is defined as “the management process that seeks to maximise returns to shareholders by developing relationships with valued customers and creating a competitive advantage.”

Marketing practice tended to be seen as a creative industry in the past, which included advertising, distribution and selling. However, because the academic study of marketing makes extensive use of social sciences, psychology, sociology, mathematics, economics, anthropology and neuroscience, the profession is now widely recognized as a science, allowing numerous universities to offer Master-of-Science (MSc) programmes.

The overall process starts with marketing research and goes through market segmentation, business planning and execution, ending with pre and post-sales promotional activities. It is also related to many of the creative arts. The marketing literature is also adept at re-inventing itself and its vocabulary according to the times and the culture.

Essay on Marketing – 5 (1000 Words)

Marketing as a term is widely used in the management of a business and in our day- to-day life. In the era of customer and competition driven business world, marketing is not just the domain for the marketing department in a company. It’s a philosophy; it’s a business orientation now. It is imbibed in the corporate vision and mission of the successful companies.

All the successful companies in India like Tata, Reliance, Mahindra, Bharti Airtel, Maruti, Birla, Bajaj, Dabur, Patanjali etc., are thriving by understanding and delivering value to the Indian consumers to serve them in a better way than their competitors.

“Marketing is a process of exchange through which needs and wants are satisfied”, so can be the definition of markets given by Philip Kotler is paraphrased.

A better explanation can be given-

“Market is not merely spatial in nature; the buyers and sellers constitute the market, even though not face-to-face. Marketing involves not merely selling but reaching out customers to sell things they want. Thus product- mix, price-mix, distribution-mix and promotion-mix are the four corner stones of marketing. Even consumption patterns and the dictates of consumers are a part of the marketing strategy and then we have to include the policies relating to taxes and subsidies and/or regulations as they affect the product, price, distribution and promotion mixes.”

Another famous name in marketing Peter Drucker emphasized that marketing issues permeate all areas of the enterprise.

There are four most important aspects of marketing and they are:

1. Choosing the product mix;

2. Choosing the price mix;

3. Planning the distributional network; and

4. Market promotion.

These are also known as four Ps [product, price, place (distribution) and promotion], “Consumer is the king” (meaning consumer dictates and is always right) has given way to “consumer is the queen”, (meaning thereby that decision are taken by the lady of the house), are the sayings that give guidepost for developing marketing. There are firms, institutions, persons and governments involved in marketing. There are historical stages of marketing.

Rudimentary barter system is exchange of “commodities with commodities” (we should not call “goods” with “goods” from the “secondary/manufacturing” sector.) By the time there is trading in “goods”, barter system gets superseded. Rural marketing in India still has a good-sized component of the barter economy. Vegetables, edible oil, pulses, milk-products and food grains are taken and given in barter in rural areas.

Transitional stage and concurrent stage between barter and monetised exchange exists (as in India even in the 21st Century). As specialisation and industrial activities develop, barter gives way to exchange with money. However, rural areas continue to have barter transactions. (Some kabaadies in India who recycle the wastes of the households as non-functional fans, old newspapers to n number of things sometimes offer double trade e.g., give anything @ Rs. 15/- and make the payment adjusted against the junk that will be taken by them.

All types of modern markets with their spatial ramifications develop in the developing economy as in India.

Fully modern marketing system will have to satisfy two conditions:

1. There is no barter there, and

2. Even plastic money (credit/debit cards) is used.

Micro-management of marketing is not concerned with increasing the purchasing power.

Macro-management of marketing should aim at various things like:

1. Laying down rules and regulations for all types of marketing;

2. Selling “social marketing” of such ideas as of family planning and/or or advising persons how to save themselves from aids; or

3. Improving purchasing power or entitlements of all groups.

Marketing of primary, secondary and tertiary sector (services) follow one basic principle—how to optimise profits, if not maximise.

What is Marketing? – Definitions of Marketing:

The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as ‘The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably’

Oxford Dictionaries define Marketing ‘as the process of performing market research, selling products and /or services to customers and promoting them via advertising to further enhance sales.’

Kotler Philip, Gary Armstrong, Veronica Wong, and John Saunders are of the view that ‘Marketing as an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves.’ It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments.

Paliwoda, Stanley J and John K. Ryans believe in a different concept called the value-based marketing, which states the role of marketing to contribute to increasing shareholder value.

American Marketing Association’s (AMA) has defined as following:

‘Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.’

Above definition was applicable till Sept., 2007. Now with the ever changing business environment, the definition of Marketing also underwent a lot of change from Oct., 2007.

Now, AMA defines Marketing as:

‘Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.’

Marketing is not just an organizational function, but it is an activity and a set of institutions are involved. Now the customers, organisation and its stakeholders have also been rephrased as Customers, Clients, Partners and Society at large. Now Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is as important as Partner Relationship Management (PRM). Societal welfare is as important as the company’s welfare.

Panasonic’s ‘Eco Ideas’, Nokia’s ‘Take Back Campaign’, HP’s ‘Power to Change’ and Toyota’s initiative for Hybrid Green Vehicles are few examples of corporate initiative for the society at large.

Philip Kotler, a well-known authority on marketing has termed marketing as a ‘societal process by which individual and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering and freely exchanging products and services of value with others.’ Marketing can also be said as the process of ‘satisfying needs and wants through an exchange process’.

In a simpler way, Kotler has defined Marketing in terms of CCDVTP, which means creating, communicating and delivering value to the target market at a profit.

Thus, Marketing is all about identifying and meeting human and social needs and that too in a profitable way. Ultimately, the objective of any business activity is to make profits.

On the whole, we can say that CCCCC STP PPPP encompasses all the aspects in marketing. Sounds confusing, let me clarify, Marketing is all about 5Cs, STP and 4Ps. 5Cs stands for Customers, Company, Competitors, Collaborators and Context. While STP stands for Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning; whereas 4Ps represent the Marketing Mix i.e. Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Essay on Business Marketing – 6 (2500 Words)

Marketing plays a critical role in modern business practice, where maximizing shareholder value is an increasingly important goal. The essence of business marketing focuses on how firms attract, retain, grow customers — critical firm assets — by enhancing relationships with them.

Success in delivering cus­tomer value leads directly to improving shareholder value and long-run firm prosperity. In Essentials of Managing Marketing, we explore both the strategic aspects of marketing and the tactical implementation decisions marketers make every day. But first, we investigate two quite different but related meanings of marketing.

Marketing as a Philosophy embraces the view that marketing is the guiding force/orientation for the entire corporation. Firms with a marketing philosophy operate with an external orientation. Such firms focus attention, resources outside the corporation — to acquire, retain, grow customers — but take careful account of a range of external environmental forces.

By contrast, internally oriented firms focus on internal issues — products, services, processes. Essentials of Business Marketing embraces the marketing-as-philosophy perspective. The author believes, and has seen in his own career, how powerful and effective a business can be when the entire organization is attuned to the external world. Such agile firms not only sense critical environmental factors, but also adapt to address them.

Marketers must possess the tools/decision-making skills to get the marketing job done. Effective marketers focus on six marketing imperatives. Marketing Imperatives describe the specifics of the marketing job. For executives with marketing/ product-management titles, these imperatives are the must-dos of marketing.

We identify two groups:

1. Strategic Marketing:

Imperative 1-Determine, recommend which markets to address.

Imperative 2- Identify, target market segments.

Imperative 3- Set strategic direction, positioning.

2. Implementing Market Strategy:

Imperative 1- Design the market offer.

Imperative 2- Secure support from other functions.

Imperative 3- Monitor and control execution/ performance.

To broaden this framework, four marketing princi­ples form the basis for marketing decision-making.

These principles act as guidelines for executing the six imperatives:

Principle 1- Selectivity, Concentration

Principle 2- Customer Value

Principle 3- Differential Advantage

Principle 4- Integration

What is Marketing?

Marketing is often confused with advertising and sales. Even many executives are unclear. It seems so intuitive; can’t anybody be a marketer? Marketing is the firm’s fundamental activity. When marketing delivers value to satisfy customer needs, the firm attracts, retains, grows customers, in the face of competitors trying to do the same thing. If costs are in line, profits follow. Profits help the firm survive as an independent entity, secure resources to grow, enhance shareholder value.

Business Marketing’s role includes identifying opportunities; figuring out customer needs; understanding com­petition; developing appealing products/services; communicating/distributing value to potential customers. When the firm does a good job of completing these tasks, shareholder value increases. Example- Flipkart — successful e-commerce firm — co-founder Sachin Bansal emphasizes that focus on customer satisfaction and owning the entire customer experience has benefited his firm.

The critical weapon in the battle for customers is straightforward in concept, but may be complex/ difficult in execution. The firm must deliver customers greater value than competitors deliver. Customers reward such firms by purchasing their products/services, today and tomorrow. This exchange is the basis of all markets.

The late Peter Drucker, preeminent management theorist, is generally credited with developing the customer orientation and modern marketing per­spective. Drucker stated, “If we want to know what a business is, we have to start with its purpose. There is only one valid definition of any business purpose — to create a customer. It is the customer who determines what a business is.

For it is the customer, and he alone, who through being willing to pay for a good or service, converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods…. Because it is [the purpose of a business] to create a customer, [the] business enterprise has two — and only these two — basic functions- marketing and innovation.”‘

Business Marketing and Shareholder Value :

The central focus on shareholder value is deeply rooted in many capitalist countries. The shareholder- value perspective defines managements job as maximizing returns for firm owners — shareholders.

In addition to shareholders, the firm has many other stakeholders — management, labor, public at large. In some capitalist countries, these stakeholders are more favored than shareholders. Indeed, in these countries regulations generally favor managers, and protect them from unwelcome mergers/acquisi­tions. Regardless, in recent years, developing global capital markets have favored the shareholder-value perspective.

Customers are the sole source of firm revenues; all firm activities are costs of attracting, retaining, growing customers. Unfortunately, managers sometimes forget this fundamental truth. Customers provide revenues/cash flow when they believe firm products/services offer better value than competitive alternatives.

Marketing as a Philosophy- External, Internal Orientations :

The firm enhances shareholder value by attracting, retaining, growing customers. At a philosophical level, each employee has some responsibility; marketing is everybody’s business.

To quote Drucker again, “Marketing is so basic that it cannot be considered a separate function within the business … it is, first, a central dimension of the entire business. It is the whole business … seen from the customers point of view. Concern and responsibility for marketing must, therefore, permeate all areas of the enterprise.”

David Haines, former brand czar at Vodafone, echoed Drucker- “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketers. It’s the obligation of every single individual in the company, whether you’re a phone operator, the CEO, or anyone else in the company.” To put it more crassly- If marketing is unsuccessful, nobody gets a paycheck!

Marketing as a philosophy concerns the firms entire orientation; such firms operate with an external orientation. The externally oriented firm looks outward to the environment; it knows that customers are central to its future. Other firms focusing on internal business drivers have one of several internal orientations-, delivering customer value takes a back seat.

i. External Orientation:

The externally oriented firm knows its current products/services/processes are the reasons for past/ present success. This firm also knows that, as the external environment evolves, its products/services/ processes must also change. The externally oriented does not fear change. This firm goes beyond a customer focus; it works hard to understand competitors markets, other environmental forces. This firm invests in new capabilities/competencies to exploit opportunities for attracting, retaining, growing customers. P&G spends over $400 million annually seeking customer/market insight.

In difficult economic times, when profits are under pressure, many firms cut spending/investment; but the externally oriented firm increases investments — human capital, marketing budgets, mergers, acquisi­tions. Example- In recent recessions, Amazon, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Intel, Tata Consultancy Services invested heavily; they swept past more internally oriented competitors.

ii. Internal Orientations :

Internally oriented firms place internal business considerations ahead of customer focus.

The orientations are:

1. Operations Orientation:

It overemphasizes improving efficiency, reducing costs. There is nothing inherently wrong with such actions; by contrast, cost reduction should not be a priority when the firm offers new products/services, enters new markets, or otherwise should invest to attract, retain, grow customers.

2. Sales Orientation:

It focuses on short-term sales revenues. The firm is less concerned with profits. Characteristic actions to secure sales- Prices set too low, unsustainable discounts, loose credit terms, excessive product variations. The firm spends little effort on marketing research, planning; targets customers indiscriminately.

3. Finance Orientation:

It focuses too heavily on short-term profits. When a firm manages by the numbers, it tends to avoid expenditures for long- term payoff. The finance-oriented firm mortgages its future by indiscriminately cutting back — adver­tising, capital investment, R&D, talent.

4. Technology Orientation:

It focuses on R&D, but pays insufficient attention to customer value. First- class products are critical for attracting, retaining, growing customers, but for this firm technology is more important than customers.

The Six Marketing Imperatives :

The job of putting the firms marketing philosophy into practice normally falls to marketing profes­sionals. These people engage in many activities; they must make decisions on how to allocate their time/other resources.

The critical question- Are we doing the right things to attract, retain, grow customers? Put another way- Are we implementing the six marketing imperatives — the firm’s must-dos. Imperatives 1, 2, 3 focus on strategic marketing; imperatives 4, 5, 6 zero in on implementing market strategy.

Imperative 1- Determine, Recommend Which Markets to Address :

The firm must answer critical questions about its business, market portfolios:

i. In which new businesses/markets shall we invest — people, time, dollars?

ii. From which businesses/markets shall we withdraw?

iii. In which current businesses/markets shall we continue to invest?

iv. How much investment shall we make in these various businesses/markets?

Marketing plays two key advisory roles. First, identify opportunities. Marketing is the only function with explicit responsibility to focus attention externally on the market, customers, competitors — outside the firm. Marketing personnel should research the environment to identify potential opportunities, then bring these to top management for go/no-go decisions.

Second, advise on proposed strategic actions. Many parts of the firm develop strategic initiatives. Marketing has the responsibility to insert itself into key decisions — collecting, analyzing relevant data — bearing on market entry/exit. Marketing should fully explore the ramifications of potential firm actions, or disaster may ensue.

Imperative 2- Identify, Target Market Segments :

Marketing must identify market segments — groups of customers with similar needs that value similar benefits with similar priority orders. Once the firm has identified market segments, it must decide which to target for effort. Effective segmentation and targeting are critical for delivering customer value and driving sales, profits.

Imperative 3- Set Strategic Direction, Positioning :

The firm decides how to compete in those market segments it has targeted. For each target segment, marketing must formulate performance objectives, then decide on firm positioning in each segment — target customers, target competitors, value propo­sition, reasons to believe. Together with Marketing Imperative 2, positioning completes the STP trium­virate — segmentation, targeting, positioning.

Typically, individual market segments are at different developmental stages; hence they require different approaches. Finally, decisions about strategic direc­tion must include questions about branding. The firm must continually assess strategic direction and make necessary course corrections.

Imperative 4- Design the Market Offer :

The market offer is the total benefit package the firm provides customers. Tools for designing offers are the most well-known part of marketing.

The marketing-mix elements — aka 4Ps — comprise the basic building blocks:

i. Product:

Generally, the product embodies major benefits the firm offers to satisfy customer needs — these benefits provide customer value. Product comprises both physical products and intangible services.

ii. Promotion:

Embraces various ways the firm communicates with customers — informing, per­suading customers to purchase (or recommend) its products. Core promotional elements include mass communications — advertising, publicity & public relations; digital marketing; personal communica­tions — sales force.

iii. Distribution:

Focuses on how, where customers secure the product (aka place).

The firm establishes its feasible price by the equivalent amount of value it offers customers via product, promotion, distribution.

Imperative 5- Secure Support from Other Functions :

Functional areas must work together to ensure the firm designs and executes the right market offer.

Business marketing requires two very different types of support:

i. Support for design — relates to technical, opera­tional, economic feasibility. This support requires keeping the firm focused on satisfying customer needs and pushing specific functions to encourage evolving their capabilities.

ii. Support for implementation — assumes the firm has agreed upon/fixed the design. Marketers must possess the leadership/interpersonal skills to secure cooperation across multiple functions — internal marketing, getting buy-in.

Imperative 6- Monitor and Control Execution/Performance :

Is the firm achieving desired results? If results are not on track, what changes should the firm make?

Marketing is a key stakeholder in securing answers to three questions; it should act appropriately based on the answers:

i. Are various functions/departments implementing the market offer?

ii. Is market/financial performance reaching planned objectives?

iii. Based on current environmental realities, are objectives, strategies, implementation plans on track? Should the firm make changes?

Four marketing principles serve as guidelines for exe­cuting the six imperatives:

Principle 1- Selectivity, Concentration :

Providing advice on market selection — Imperative 1 — and deciding which market segments to target — Imperative 2 — are among marketing’s primary responsibilities.

Underlying these imperatives is the-

i. Selectivity- Carefully choose targets for firm efforts.

ii. Concentration- Concentrate resources against those targets.

This principle is about choosing the firm’s battles. It is dangerous to dissipate limited resources over too many alternatives by trying to do too much. No orga­nization, no matter how large or how successful, has infinite resources.

Some experts re-label this principle Concentration and Concession. Not only must the firm concentrate resources, it should affirmatively decide where it does not want to compete.

Principle 2- Customer Value :

Market success depends on providing value to cus­tomers. This principle is central to the marketing job. Customer insight should drive design, implemen­tation of market offers, product/investment deci­sions, and performance evaluations. The firm develops, produces, delivers products/services, but customers perceive value only in the benefits these products/ services provide.

Customer value is a moving target. As the environ­ment evolves, customers accumulate experience; the needs and benefits they seek evolve also. World-class companies continuously invest in marketing research to probe deeply into customer needs, priorities, expectations, and experiences. They feed these results into the product development process to generate greater value for customers.

Firms that take their eye off the customer ball can get into serious trouble. Shoppers Stop, Aditya Birla Retail, Reliance Retail have closed many unprofitable stores in recent years.

Principle 3- Differential Advantage :

Closely related to the Principle of Customer Value; differential advantage lies at the heart of every successful market strategy —the firm should offer customers something they value, but cannot get elsewhere. Differential advantage is similar to competitive advantage, unique selling proposition, having an edge.

To implement this principle, the firm must develop well-designed market offers, based on the marketing-mix elements, and secure buy-in from other functions.

i. Competition:

Offering customer value is not enough. To avoid competitive parity, the firm must offer greater value than competitors. The firm must create/recreate differential advantage to beat com­petitors.

ii. Superiority:

Some differential advantages are better than others. Differential advantage based on propri­etary intellectual property, unique product design, product availability may be more sustainable than differential advantage based on communications.

A differential advantage based on an organizational process like parts delivery, qualified technicians may be even more sustainable.

iii. Erosion:

Competition will eventually erode even the apparently most sustainable differential advantage. Maintaining differential advantage is marketing’s most fundamental challenge; the search for differential advantage must be continuous.

iv. Cannibalization:

To stay ahead of competition, the firm must be willing to cannibalize its own offers. Many firms will not do so — in part because of strong political constituencies for the status quo; in part because profit margins may be lower. Such unwillingness to act runs the risk of missing oppor­tunities, passing market initiative to a competitor.

v. Differential Advantage and Difference:

A differ­ential advantage is not the same as a difference. Developing a different market offer may not be difficult. Differential advantage must create benefits/values customers recognize, and are willing to pay for.

Principle 4- Integration :

This principle has two dimensions:

i. Customer:

The firm must carefully integrate and coordinate all design and execution elements it offers customers. Poor advertising can ruin an excellent product; delayed promotional materials can doom product launch; improper pricing can cause havoc with sales forecasts.

The firm must carefully integrate/coordinate all internal activities. Different functions/depart­ments must work together; they must avoid squab­bles over priorities, turf wars, ambiguous messages by senior managers. Firms with an external orientation are more likely to achieve integration; employees, departments, businesses share a common purpose — serving cus­tomers. Sharing responsibility for designing, imple­menting market offers drives agreement on priorities and close/cooperative working relationships.

Essay on Marketing Topics – 7 (1900 Words)

Marketing refers to a social process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering and exchanging products and services of value freely with others. It is the sum-total of all the activities that facilitate flow of goods and services from producers to the ultimate consumers.

In simple words, marketing involves study and management of exchange relationships. It is used as a tool by business to create the customer, to keep the customer and to satisfy the customer.

Marketing is concerned with all the activities of a company which are associated with buying and selling of a good or a service. It involves activities that aim at making people aware of the company’s goods or services and making sure that these are available to be bought and availed respectively.

Marketers are involved in marketing various types of entities like goods, services, experiences, events, persons, places, properties, organisations, information and ideas. Marketing is an ongoing communication exchange with customers in a way that educates, informs and builds a relationship over time.

It is the process by which a firm profitably translates customers’ needs into revenue. It also involves building a brand and convincing people that a particular brand is the best.

It aims at satisfying the needs and wants of the customers and thereby retaining them for the longest possible period of time. Marketing attracts consumers’ scarce resources, attention and disposable income to derive profitable revenues.

It is the process of getting a product or service from a company to its end-customers from product development through to the final sale and post purchase support.

Essay Topic # 1. Definition of Marketing:

Some Important Definitions of Marketing:

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large. —American Marketing Association (AMA)

Marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. If defines, measures and quantifies the size of the identified market and the profit potential. It pinpoints which segments the company is capable of serving best, and it designs and promotes the appropriate products and services. —Philip Kotler

Marketing is a management activity that identifies, anticipates and satisfies customer requirements efficiently and profitably. —Mark Gwilliam

Marketing is the management process for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably. —Chartered Institute of Marketing

Marketing is the business process by which products are matched with the markets and through which transfers of ownership are affected. —F.E.Clark

Marketing is that phase of business activity through which the human wants are satisfied by the exchange of goods and services. — J.F.Pyle

Marketing is the social process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others. — Philip Kotler

Essay Topic # 2. Nature of Marketing:

(i) Customer Focused – All marketing activities should be customer oriented. They should start with identifying the customer’s needs, followed by developing products, pricing it, promoting it and distributing it as per the customer’s requirements.

(ii) Integrated Process – Being an integrated process, marketing involves coordination of many activities with other business functions like production, personnel, financing, research and development.

(iii) Multi-Disciplinary – Marketing is multi-disciplinary as it has evolved out of commerce and has got its strength from law, psychology, sociology, mathematics and statistics. It is an art as well as a science.

(iv) Interaction with External Environment – It operates within the framework of external environment which comprises of economic, natural, social, legal, political environment etc.

(v) Mutually Beneficial Exchange – It means buyers get want-satisfying goods and sellers get value in exchange of their goods leading to mutual benefit to both the parties.

(vi) Based on System Approach – It is based on system approach as it requires intelligent coordination of four ‘P’s of marketing mix. These are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Essay Topic # 3. Importance of Marketing:

(i) It is the beating heart of a business organization – Being the revenue producing department, it is a very important function of management.

(ii) It facilitates creation of place, time and possession utility – As creating these utilities help a marketer to achieve success in the business.

(iii) It helps in improving the standard of living of the people – This is done by offering wide variety of goods and services to the people.

(iv) It generates employment – A large number of people are employed by marketers to carry out various functions of marketing.

(v) It leads to economic development of the nation – It mobilises untapped resources and facilitates full utilisation of production capacity and other assets and hence leads to economic development of the nation.

Essay Topic # 4. Modern Marketing:

The Present Day Marketing is Customer Driven:

Business must find out what the consumers want and then produce goods according to the needs of the consumers. What is offered for sale should be determined by the buyer rather than by the seller. Instead of trying to market (sell) what is easiest for us to make, we must find out much more about what the consumer is willing to buy.

Under consumer-oriented marketing it is highly essential to know what the consumers really want. This is possible only when information is collected from the consumers.

Marketing research and Marketing Information Systems are now-a-days full-fledged functions of marketing. All organisations accept that the marketing activities must start far ahead of production. The company must appreciate and understand the consumers’ strategic position as a determinant of the firm’s survival and growth.

This philosophy of marketing means that the entire marketing is designed to serve consumer needs. The marketing man is introduced at the beginning rather than at the end of the production cycle and marketing is integrated at each phase of the business.

Thus, Marketing, through its studies and research will determine for the engineer, designer and the manufacturing manager, what the consumer wants in a given product, what price he is willing to pay and where and when it will be wanted. The launch of the ‘Nano’, a small car for the common man of India at an affordable price is a glaring example of this statement, i.e., the present day marketing is customer driven.

Marketing Begins before Production and Continues after Sale:

Marketing is an organizational function which includes a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stake­holders.

By stating definition of marketing itself, it becomes clear that marketing also deals with the creation of a product. It is done by means of proactive marketing, i.e., focussing on customers’ latent needs. For this the process of Marketing Research is applied. These days the companies’ strategies have shifted from “make-and-sell” philosophy to “sense-and-respond” philosophy.

In order to identify the needs of customers various surveys are conducted, pilot studies are done. The respondents are not just prospective customers but also front line executives, since they know a lot about the needs of customers.

At each stage of new product development, marketing has a key role to play.

Marketing after sales – Making a new customer is costlier than retaining an old one. Therefore, it is necessary to keep the customers not only satisfied, but rather delighted. This can be done through customer relationship management, where marketers can offer to provide after sales-services, warranties, guarantees, product resale offers, discounts on next purchase etc.

Marketing Creates Value for Customers and Builds Profitable Customer Relationships and Captures Value from Customers in Return:

“Marketing creates value for customers and builds profitable customer relationships and captures value from customers in return.” This statement very aptly describes the essence of marketing in modern scenario. It is a two way process of creating value for customers by offering high quality products in exchange of a price which acts as value from the customers.

It is a mutual beneficial activity where focus is on building and maintaining long-term profitable customer relationships. Today’s successful companies are strongly customer focussed and heavily committed to marketing. They share passion for understanding and satisfying customers’ wants and make a sincere effort to provide solutions by coming out with innovative products.

For example – Procter & Gamble, one of the world’s largest and most respected marketing company creates value for customers by offering innovative products like Tide, Pantene, Gillette, etc. which are widely accepted by customers and in return Procter & Gamble gets rewarded with brand loyal customers.

Similarly, Philips is another company which is always striving to come out with novel solutions for existing problems and produces high quality innovative products like ‘Air Fryer’, ‘Electric Shaver’, etc. They too are rewarded by customers in return with strong loyalty and quick purchases of their products.

Modern Marketing is an Integrated Process of Identification, Assessment and Satisfaction of Human Wants:

The modern marketing concept enunciates that business is essentially a ‘need-satisfying process’ and that any business must be managed keeping the consumer and his needs as the main focus.

All goals of business including profit must be realised through consumer orientation, integrated management action and generation of consumer satisfaction. Matching products with the market implies determining the requirements of potential customers and designing products that satisfy these requirements.

Thus, modern marketing is the integrated process of identification, assessment and satisfaction of human wants. The focus is on the customer and his wants. It is the process of discovering and translating consumer wants into products and services and then in turn making it possible for more and more people to enjoy more and more of these products and services.

Concern for customers’ needs and wants increases the acceptability of the product. When a firm produces the product which meets the requirements of the customers, the need for promotion is reduced. It ensures continuous patronage of customers.

Unification of business activities leads to economy and efficiency in marketing operations. The systems approach to marketing facilitates a rational analysis of all marketing problems along with their effective solutions.

It helps the management to direct organisational effort towards the long-term and wider goals like stability and growth of the firm. Sustained interaction with customers becomes possible.

It is the management orientation that holds that the key task of the organisation is to determine the needs, wants and values of a target market and to adapt the organisation to deliver the desired satisfaction more effectively and efficiently than its competitors.

Thus, modern marketing is an integrated process of identification, assessment and satisfaction of human wants.

Modern Marketing Concept is Applicable to All Business Organisations Irrespective of their Size, Nature or Functionality:

The adoption and use of modern marketing concepts have various benefits for any company irrespective of their size, nature or functionality.

Some of the benefits are listed below:

(i) Concern for customers’ needs and wants rather than itself product increases the acceptability of the product.

(ii) Marketing concept requires an integrated and coordinated approach to marketing. Hence all the business activities are focussed towards a single organisational goal.

(iii) Marketing concept is a system approach to marketing. It facilitates a rational analysis of all marketing problems along with their effective solution.

(iv) A business firm pursuing Marketing concept can respond effectively to the changes occurring in the marketing environment.

(v) Marketing concept has a strategic and philosophical value. It helps the management to direct organisational efforts towards long term and wider goals.

Related Articles:

• Essay on International Marketing
• Essay on Marketing Environment | Company

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Procter & Gamble Company’s Marketing Problems

Key person and his/her position in the organization

A.G. Lafly, chairman of the board, president, and CEO of Procter and Gamble is the main decision-maker.

Basic facts of the case

Founded in 1837 Procter &Gamble is an American company, one of the leaders of the world market of consumer goods. The headquarters of the company are in Cincinnati, state of Ohio. Over the past 20 years, Procter & Gamble – the world’s most sophisticated marketing machine – withdrew to the market many good brands. This Vicks, Oil of Olay, Pantene, Cover Girl, Noxzema, Clarion, Old Spice, Max Factor, Giorgio, Baby Fresh, Tampax, Iams, Spinbrush, Clairol, Wella, and Glide. But in fact, P & G bought all of these 16 brands and restart them as their own.

One recent acquisition could become Gillette – producer of shaving supplies, shaving cream, batteries, and toothbrushes. As a result of the merger, which should be called a unique opportunity and miracle-transaction, this will create the world’s largest in the industry. Buying Gillette was preceded by two more major acquisitions P & G: in 2001 for 5 billion dollars a manufacturer of hair dyes Clairol was bought, and two years later – German company Wella.

Now manufacturers of the consumer goods sector have been caught between declining sales, rising costs, and reduced opportunities for price manipulation. P & G expects that the increase in the number of super brands will help it cope with the severe situation in the industry. Competing for the attention of the consumer is now very tight.

P&G is the most important competitor to Unilever on the market of personal hygiene products, to which half of the business is fallen to Unilever. In turn, Gillette competes with Unilever as the producer of toothpaste, deodorants, and toilet water. After combining efforts, P&G and Gillette have to increase their chances by recapturing the positions Of Unilever. As history shows, competitors are adapted to the new medium on the market very rapidly.

But it is first necessary to determine, what value has the size of the company. So far it cannot be said with confidence that the companies, focused on several basic brands, as a result, will lose to giants in the adjacent categories. The supporters of the expansion of product briefcases assert that the important company can due to the effect of scale decrease expenditures, and the saved money be used to increase the investments into the advertisement and the innovations. However, one should consider that there is a risk of anti-savings on the scale. Company- giants are less maneuverable, and their expenditures tend to a sharp increase.

In particular, the completion of the transactions of confluence can last very long. Until now, P&G yet it did not solve all questions to complete the process of the integration with Gillette. However there it was, at the given moment the presence of a strong brand is more important than the size of the company. Therefore the CEO of the company has to choose one of the alternatives to assure further growth.

Alternatives

• A – Concentrate on developing products of distinction
• B – Concentrate on regions where the potential of growth rate is substantially higher (India, China)
• C – Increase expenditure on research and development and contribute additional innovation in the already formed brands
• D- Transfer the organizational management from a regional basis to global strategy
• E – Combination of B and D

Chosen alternative: The chosen alternative is E.

Justification for your choice

P&G should pass the control of business according to the regional sign (in individual countries) to the scheme, where each region of business is governed centralized by global bosses, including goods for child care, cloths care, hair, and goods for the health. Regional managers become accountable to the leaders of global subdivisions, but a large part of the marketing solutions are solved independently. The global brands of P&G the strategic solutions are received by the Presidents of those brands.

With the old, regional structure the brands cleaning products or toothpaste have less attention because they did not have the priority. Accordingly, alternatives B, D, and their combination met all the absolute criteria.

What do you expect to happen as a result of implementing your decision?

Reconsideration or simply the comprehension of the mission of the enterprise gives birth to the forces, which will lead the company to completely different prospects and possibilities. Many earlier questions arise and would be answered. On what market we do work? Which competition on the market, where we do work? What strong sides of enterprise will make successful its further development? How to avoid threats from the side of the weak sides of enterprise? How to in the best way carry out the formulated mission and lead the enterprise to an increase in its profitableness?

The divisions with the most potential will be primary and the divisions that lag in profits would be abandoned in favor of the prospective ones. Therefore the profit between divisions and the annual growth would be equalized, thus help to implement a global marketing strategy for the corporation as a whole.

Short Cycle Analysis

Who is the main decision-maker here.

How to continue the upward performance of the company and the trend.

• The lack of new products against popularizing the established trends.
• Fulfill the potential to grow more internationally.
• The possibility of affecting the image of the company due to reducing employee’s staff one company and increase in the new one.
• Competitors position
• Mediocre profits in the snack and beverages sector.

The company is about to make a huge merger with Gillette which should require a different strategy and different approach since the market can be affected especially from the competitor’s side, so several steps should be taken now.

By when must the key person make this decision?

The decision should be made before the company starts restructuring its organizational and marketing issues due to the merger, especially the possible dismissal of the large number of employees that could affect the image of the company. Another issue in the merger is renewing the image of the company as an innovator and present new products along with a new marketing campaign to attract new customers.

What are the stakes?

Questions to ask

• Does the strategy keep the growth rate high?
• Will the global management fulfill its expectations?
• Will the expenditures be minimized?

Long Cycle Analysis

Statement of problem or aspiration: As the “Old” brands, where growth rates are relatively lower for manufacturers of consumer goods are not the source of faster growth. Lafly, the president of Procter& Gamble should be concerned about the possibility of the company reaching a steady state that could be overwhelmed by new brands and companies.

Importance-Urgency Matrix

SWOT analysis

Absolute criteria

• A1 – The brand is equally recognizable in all divisions of products
• A2 – Regionally and globally the brand has the same positive appreciation
• A3 – Demand for the product exceeds the demand for innovative approaches for re-branding
• A4 – Absence of weak follow-up brand products.

Relative criteria

• Alt1 – Concentrate on developing products of distinction
• Alt2 – Concentrate on regions where the potential of growth rate is substantially higher (India, China)
• Alt3 – Increase expenditure on research and development and contribute additional innovation in the already formed brands
• Alt4 – Transfer the organizational management from a regional basis to global strategy
• Alt5 – Combination of 2 and 4

Analysis of alternatives against absolute and relative criteria

Risk Management

Managing implementation

Cite this paper

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• Chicago (A-D)
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IvyPanda. (2024, February 29). 107 Marketing Research Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/marketing-research-essay-topics/

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IvyPanda . "107 Marketing Research Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/marketing-research-essay-topics/.

How Improv Comedy Can Help Resolve Conflicts

I live in rural Maine where I co-founded an organization working with teachers around the globe to advance humane education, a field that prepares people to create a more just and peaceful future. Transforming schools, curricula, and strategies for positive change is no easy task these days. But I discovered a new powerful approach: improv comedy. 

I’m far from the comedy hubs of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, but we have an incredibly talented Second City-trained couple who’ve brought improv to our community both as performers and teachers. I began taking classes from them years ago and came to realize the lessons I was learning could do more than make people laugh; they could help build a better world.

The more I practiced, the more I witnessed improv’s power to cultivate a solutions-focused mindset and diminish the polarization that stymies positive change. The key lay in four core rules: building relationships, embracing “yes, and”,  bringing the love, and helping others shine.

Building relationships

The reason “building relationships” is the first rule of improv comedy is because without establishing a relationship, the actors struggle to care about each other, express relatable emotions, and move the scene forward. If the actors don’t care, neither will the audience. Improvisors must establish a relationship even when they don’t naturally relate to or like what their scene partner is doing or saying. To effectively address real-life problems, we also need to build relationships with those we don’t relate to or who do and say things we don’t like.

Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, I was speaking at a conference and one of the other keynoters, a well-known Harvard professor, said he didn’t know anyone who voted for Trump. Was he subtly suggesting that Trump supporters were not worth knowing? Unlike him, I knew plenty of people who’d voted for Trump, and I welcomed the opportunity to understand their perspectives, which were different from my own. Our conversations helped us expand our perspectives, think in more nuanced ways, and identify solutions to problems we could both agree on.

It’s understandable that we often choose to avoid “them”—whoever we define “them” to be. Having dedicated my life to advancing women’s rights, animal protection, environmental sustainability, and social justice, it takes ongoing commitment to the value of building relationships across divides for me to seek out friendships with people who fight against a woman’s right to have an abortion, kill animals recreationally, oppose sensible environmental regulations, or say things I consider bigoted. But I know that unless I build such relationships, I’m more likely to stereotype and possibly even vilify others who have different beliefs, as well as miss opportunities to cooperatively develop solutions to problems. The more I build these relationships, the more successful I am at understanding divergent perspectives and even shifting others’ thinking.

Embracing “yes and”

The second improv rule is “yes, and,” which refers to the practice of embracing whatever premise a scene partner suggests (“yes”) and adding to the prompts they offer (“and”). Imagine an improv actor starting a scene with “Mom, I’ve entered us into the parent-child acrobatic competition at school,” and “Mom” responding, “Great Brian! We can wear the pink polka dot tights I got on eBay!” The scene is moving forward not only because a relationship was established but also because of “yes, and.”

In improv comedy, “yes, and” primes us to listen carefully and welcome others’ suggestions so we can collaborate on creating a great scene. Just imagine what would have happened in the scene above had the actor identified as “Mom” responded, “I’m not your mother, and I don’t do acrobatics.” The scene would have crashed, and the first actor would have had nowhere to go from there.

Read More: You Should Say ‘Yes’ to Every New Opportunity

In our everyday lives, “yes, and” is a mindset that asks us to look for points of agreement and then add our own ideas. Embracing “yes, and” can be quite challenging, especially around highly charged issues. Nonetheless, we can usually find some area of agreement. For example, both pro-choice and pro-life advocates generally want as few girls and women as possible to face an unwanted pregnancy. And no one wants mass shootings to persist. If we can begin with even a thread of agreement about a problem, that common ground opens the possibility for respectfully sharing ideas and paves the way for potential collaboration.

Bringing the love

Rule three, “bringing the love,” is foundational to improv comedy because conflicts on stage aren’t usually funny (unless you’re Larry David). In real life, bringing the love often requires significant effort. It’s often much easier to focus on negatives. Who expresses love for the people driving respectfully alongside us on the highway? As soon as we’re cut off in traffic, however, we may lay on the horn and practically lose our minds with fury. Extend this tendency toward society at large, and a cesspool of vitriol often spews from our psychic underworld through the comfort of our keyboards or the power of a mob. Meanwhile, solutions to problems become ever more elusive as we burn potential bridges and fuel our outrage.

In improv comedy, the actors have an advantage: they’re actively endeavoring to bring the love. In real life, we’re frequently faced with others doing anything but, which makes bringing the love that much harder. Yet when we successfully meet hostility with love—to the degree that this is possible and makes sense—it’s not uncommon to watch that love melt another’s anger. When this happens, even solving our most intractable problems seems possible.

Helping others shine

Finally, improvisers strive to “help others shine.” They know that as their fellow actors shine, so shines the scene. As in improv comedy, so in life. Adopting this rule offers us a way to dial down our desire for the spotlight in favor of a bigger goal. As more of us seek out, learn from, and share whatever is worthy of light—and amplify the voices of those doing good work that’s flying under the radar—building humane and sustainable societies may even become likely.

I didn’t expect that improv would be key to effectively addressing the real-world problems I cared about—or that its four core rules would guide so much of my life’s work. Just as developing good improv skills requires practice, it takes practice to apply these rules in real life.

Establishing such a practice isn’t easy. It requires a commitment to listening, staying present, and remaining open. But the more we practice, the greater the rewards: more meaningful relationships, increased curiosity and creativity, and successful collaboration to uncover and implement solutions to the thorny problems we face.

Adapted from The Solutionary Way: Transform Your Life, Your Community, and The World For the Better . by Zoe Weil, published by New Society Publishers. Copyright © 2024 by Zoe Weil. Reprinted courtesy of New Society Publishers.

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• Americans’ Views of Government’s Role: Persistent Divisions and Areas of Agreement

Wide majorities of Biden and Trump supporters oppose cuts to Social Security

Table of contents.

• Views on the efficiency of government
• Views on the government’s regulation of business
• Confidence in the nation’s ability to solve problems
• Views on the effect of government aid to the poor
• Views on government’s role in health care
• Views on the future of Social Security
• Trust in government
• Feelings toward the federal government
• Acknowledgments
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand Americans’ attitudes about U.S. government, such as its size and role.

This report is based primarily on a survey of 8,709 adults, including 7,166 registered voters, from April 8 to 14, 2024. Some of the analysis in this report is based on a survey of 8,638 adults from May 13 to 19, 2024.

Everyone who took part in these surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for the report and its methodology .

While the economy, immigration and abortion have emerged as major issues in the 2024 election, Joe Biden and Donald Trump also have dramatically different ideas about the size and role of government.

These differences reflect decades-old divisions between Democrats and Republicans over the scope of government.

Among registered voters, large majorities of Biden supporters – roughly three-quarters or more – favor a bigger, more activist government.

• 74% say they would rather have a bigger government providing more services.
• 76% say government should do more to solve problems.
• 80% say government aid to the poor “does more good than harm.”

Trump supporters, by comparable margins, take the opposing view on all three questions.

The Pew Research Center survey of 8,709 adults – including 7,166 registered voters – conducted April 8-14, 2024, examines Americans’ views of the role and scope of government , the social safety net and long-term trends in trust in the federal government .

Democratic support for bigger government is little changed in the last five years but remains higher than it was a decade ago. Republicans’ views have shifted less over the last 10 years.

Among all adults, about three-quarters of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents favor a bigger government, up from about six-in-ten in 2014 and 2015. The share of Republicans and Republican leaners who prefer a bigger government has increased only modestly over the same period.

Democratic support for bigger government, while slightly lower than in 2021 (78%), remains at nearly its highest level in five decades. During Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, fewer than half of Democrats said they preferred a bigger government with more services.

Voters continue to express very different views about government’s role in specific areas than about the government generally.

A large majority of voters (80%) – including 82% of Biden supporters and 78% of Trump supporters – say that in thinking about the long-term future of Social Security, benefits should not be reduced in any way.

However, Biden supporters are more likely than Trump supporters to say Social Security should cover more people with greater benefits.

• 46% of Biden supporters favor expanding Social Security coverage and benefits, compared with 28% of Trump supporters.

Most Americans (65%) continue to say the federal government has a responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage.

Democrats overwhelmingly (88%) say the federal government has this responsibility, compared with 40% of Republicans.

The share of Republicans who say the government has a responsibility to provide health coverage has increased 8 percentage points since 2021, from 32% to 40%.

There are wide income differences among Republicans in opinions about the government’s role in health care:

• 56% of Republicans with lower family incomes say the government has a responsibility to provide health coverage for all, compared with 36% of those with middle incomes and 29% of higher-income Republicans.

When asked how the government should provide health coverage, 36% of Americans say it should be provided through a single national program, while 28% say it should be through a mix of government and private programs. These views have changed little in recent years.

Democrats continue to be more likely than Republicans to favor a “single payer” government health insurance program (53% vs. 18%).

Other key findings in this report

• Americans’ trust in the federal government remains low but has modestly increased since last year. Today, 22% of American adults say they trust the government to do what is right always or most of the time, which is up from 16% in June 2023.
• While the public overall is divided over the nation’s ability to solve important problems, young adults are notably pessimistic about the country’s ability to solve problems . About half of Americans (52%) say the U.S. can’t solve many of its important problems, while 47% say it can find a way to solve problems and get what it wants. Roughly six-in-ten adults under age 30 (62%) say the nation can’t solve major problems, the highest share in any age group and 16 points higher than two years ago.

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Freud’s Notebook: “To Remember is to Relive”

June 27, 2024

Posted by: Neely Tucker

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—This is a guest post by Meg McAleer, a former historian in the Manuscript Division .

Sigmund Freud returned again and again to the problem of memory as he formulated his theories of psychoanalysis during the 1890s, as the Library’s significant collection of his papers show.

“What is essentially new about my theory,” Freud wrote in this letter to fellow physician and confidante Wilhelm Fliess, “is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over, that it is laid down in various kinds of indications.” The second page of this letter sketches the progression of memory from perception (“W”) to the unconscious (“Ub (II)”) and eventually to consciousness (“Bew”).

Freud refined his theories over time in significant ways but remained committed to the notion that the past exerts a powerful influence over the present as memories embedded in the unconscious break through into consciousness through selective, altered and fluid remembering and forgetting.

Slipped into a pocket and kept close to the body, pocket notebooks are intimate, hidden and always accessible.

Freud purchased this small leather-bound notebook while vacationing in Florence in the waning summer of 1907. Its cover bears the Italian words “Ricordare è rivivere” (“to remember is to relive”). Freud owned many similar notebooks, filling them sequentially through the decades with jottings of names, addresses, expenses, ideas and observations.

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‘It’s All Happening Again.’ The Supply Chain Is Under Strain.

As Houthi rebels intensify strikes on vessels headed for the Suez Canal, global shipping prices are soaring, raising fears of product shortages and delays.

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By Peter S. Goodman

Peter Goodman has reported extensively on the global supply chain since the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Stephanie Loomis had hoped that the chaos besieging the global supply chain was subsiding. The floating traffic jams off ports . The multiplying costs of moving freight . The resulting shortages of goods . All of this had seemed like an unpleasant memory confined to the Covid-19 pandemic.

No such luck.

As head of ocean freight for the Americas at Rhenus Logistics, a company based in Germany, Ms. Loomis spends her days negotiating with international shipping carriers on behalf of clients moving products and parts around the globe. Over the last few months, she has watched cargo prices soar as a series of disturbances have roiled the seas.

Late last year, Houthi rebels in Yemen began firing on ships entering the Red Sea en route to the Suez Canal , a vital artery for vessels moving between Asia, Europe and the East Coast of the United States. That prompted ships to avoid the waterway, instead moving the long way around Africa, lengthening their journeys by as much as two weeks.

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The intensifying upheaval in shipping is prompting carriers to lift rates while raising the specter of waterborne gridlock that could again threaten retailers with product shortages during the make-or-break holiday shopping season. The disruption could also exacerbate inflation, a source of economic anxiety animating the American presidential election.

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DARPA searched for fields quantum computers really could revolutionize, with mixed results

It's not all hype, but more work is needed before solutions are feasible or affordable.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has published the results of an exercise that assessed whether quantum computers will deliver on the promise of solving problems that stump classical machines – with mixed results.

In 2021 DARPA created a Quantum Benchmarking program "with the goal of reinventing the metrics critical to measuring quantum computing progress and applying scientific rigor to often unsubstantiated claims about quantum computing's future promise."

That effort saw DARPA create eight interdisciplinary teams, which compiled "more than 200 potential applications from which they created 20 candidate benchmarks that could quantify progress in using quantum computers to solve hard computational tasks with economic utility."

A second phase of work saw benchmarks selected for detailed study in three broad categories: chemistry, materials science, and non-linear differential equations. Five teams refined those benchmarks using what DARPA last week described as "rigorous, utility-driven criteria, and then expand[ed] those benchmarks' applications, incorporate scalable and robust testing, evaluate real-world utility, and create tools for estimating resources and performance needed to run end-to-end instantiations of the applications on realistic quantum hardware."

The result of that effort is seven pre-press papers – all available here – that DARPA believes demonstrate it "is plausible that quantum computers will provide advantage for economically valuable applications in certain chemistry, quantum materials, and materials science applications."

But the news isn't all good. One of the papers is titled "Feasibility of accelerating incompressible computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations with fault-tolerant quantum computers" and finds that, while quantum systems have plenty of promise, "future quantum computers are unlikely to provide utility for incompressible CFD applications unless significant algorithmic advancements or alternative quantum approaches are developed."

A similar conclusion is reached in another of the papers, catchily titled "Quantifying fault tolerant simulation of strongly correlated systems using the Fermi-Hubbard model" – an unsolved approach to assessing the properties of materials thought to be a workload ideally suited to quantum computers.

One approach to the problem uses a technique called "time evolution circuits" and would require "a calculation that takes over three years and uses 400 logical qubits."

Given that the hardware required for even that pace of computation "is at the extreme end of today's classical hardware, this points to a need for improvement along a variety of axes."

Quantinuum inches closer to fault-tolerant quantum with a 56 qubit machine

Intel's quantum leap in wafer-wide cryo-testing sets cool new standard.

A paper on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is more positive, suggesting quantum computers could model phenomena that are currently hard to analyze with classical machines.

Another of the papers, "Applications and resource estimates for open system simulation on a quantum computer," found that quantum computers could lead to savings of $2 million in the cost of materials needed for each test at the Los Alamos National Laboratory's High Magnetic Field Laboratory. That lab is also mentioned in another of the papers – titled "Potential Applications of Quantum Computing at Los Alamos National Laboratory" – in which another six fields of research suitable for quantum computers are described.

One of the papers considers quantum computers themselves. Titled "Fault-tolerant resource estimation using graph-state compilation on a modular superconducting architecture," the document considers how to build quantum computers to tackle scientific tasks.

The document's authors conclude that "a fault-tolerant quantum computer based on a distributed superconducting architecture, consisting of two modules could, in principle, house 2,000,000 physical qubits and could serve scientifically interesting applications in a reasonable run-time."

None of the documents express certainty that quantum machines will revolutionize the fields they consider. But they also assume fault-tolerant machines will work on the problems considered – and such machines are nascent.

Three more pre-press papers are in the works:

• Quantum computing for corrosion-resistant materials and anti-corrosive coatings design, by Boeing Research and Technology;
• Fullerene-encapsulated Cyclic Ozone for the Next Generation of Nano-sized Propellants via Quantum Computation, from HRL Laboratories, LLC;
• Quantum Resources Required for Binding Affinity Calculations of Amyloid-Beta, also from HRL Laboratories, LLC

Quantum enthusiasts may take heart from knowing that the papers are yet to be peer-reviewed – meaning they could be wrong, and a land of quantum unicorns and rainbows awaits us all mere weeks after AI solves all the problems quantum computers were going to address. ®

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