I used to think that marketing was just a push to sell products to everyone by spamming them with advertisements, and other sales pitches. However, marketing is much more than that. A producer shouldn’t be trying to sell a product or service after it has been developed. They should only be developing goods that they’ve verified, through research, that the consumers want to purchase. If you start by determining what consumers want, or need, and develop new products or services based on that, you’ll have a much easier time trying to sell your goods.
When you determine what the consumer wants, you also need to determine how much the consumer is willing to pay for the goods. You need to figure out who your competition is, if any, and how much they are charging for the same goods. You need to figure out if you can afford to provide, or produce, the goods at the price the consumers are willing to pay. If the producer can’t make a profit from the goods, there is no sense in moving the idea forward.
The marketing process doesn’t stop there. You also need to figure out how to support, maintain, and provide warranty services, if needed, for the goods produced. The key here is making sure that you keep the consumers coming back to the same producer in the future. If you just push the goods out the door, and the consumer isn’t satisfied with what they’ve received, they’ll probably choose another producer in the future. If this happens, the marketing process has failed.
If the process is done correctly, it’ll not only help the producer be successful, but it will also make the consumer happy, and possibly provide new employment opportunities for the society as a whole. Someone will probably need to provide customer support, and technical support for the goods. If this is a tangible good someone will also need to work in the factories that produce the goods.
Lastly, marketing will help the evolution of products and services overall, as various producers attempt to market their products and services to the consumers. Producers will be forced to not only drive the prices down in order to compete with other producers, but also to improve the quality of products, and therefore increase our own technological advancement at the same time. These marketing principles can be set by the government, which usually leads to a very poor society, or by the society itself.
The problem with the latter, is that consumers tend to want a large selection of products and goods to choose from. However, the cost is usually only brought down when the producers can mass produce one product, or good, for an extended period of time. The society will demand lower prices, and better products, while the producers struggle to meet those demands by trying to provide a wide array of products and services, which usually drives the prices up.
I believe this definition of marketing is valid because it can be proven, by researching any current society that exists today. If you study marketing and economics, you can determine how the two are related. You can also look at societies where the government is in control of deciding what is produced and marketed. You’ll probably see that those societies are usually poor, or at least unbalanced, in a way that favors only a small portion of the society. You can also take a look at the United States, or even at yourself.
You probably expect a company to provide a nice selection of goods. When you make the decision to purchase a new cell phone, you’re probably going to want a variety of phones to play with and choose from. But you’ll still expect the price to be low. You’ll also want the customer service to be professional, and a warranty. Returns should be easy, if they need to happen at all.
This entire process, if done correctly, leads to a circular relationship, where both the producer, and consumer, are “paid” for their participation.