Marketing and its importance of discovering and satisfying consumer needs and wants.

Marketing and its importance of discovering and satisfying consumer needs and wants.

Marketing is a process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others. Importantly, marketing is the delivery of customer satisfaction at a profit.

Marketing is an ongoing activity that does not stop, continuously obtaining needs that defines a state of felt deprivation and wants that defines what is need. It involves transaction in terms price, place, product and promotion. At the end of this exchange, the most important result most desired is customer satisfaction.

 

The discovering of needs and wants is the first journey of relative importance as it involves marketing research, market segmentation, prices, distribution and roles of technology.

Marketing research aid us in discovering the needs and wants, creating a desire. Therefore, we are able to develop the right product. In the real world, besides developing the right product. We need transactions that involve place, price and promotion. This constitutes the entire marketing effort to achieve customer satisfaction and value at a profit. Value refers to customer satisfaction, where value denotes benefits more than cost. Benefits can derive from tangibles such as savings and intangibles such as psychological. Marketing Research leads us to a lot of avenues such as customers’ perceptions of your brand, product & service. The probability of current customers becoming repeat purchasers, the customers’ views of your competition and the customers’ future needs & wants.

Let us move on to market segmentation, which is a part of discovering needs and wants. At this stage, we are able to filter out and speculate consumer’s individual characteristic through age, sex, lifestyle and purchasing behaviour. With that, marketers are able to target what is deemed appropriate and suitable to the desired needs and wants.

Next, we can discover the needs and wants through prices. Prices are the sum of all the values that consumers exchange for the benefits of having or using the product or service. Price is the only important element in the marketing mix that produces revenue and it is the one of the most flexible elements of marketing.

We should reflect the discovery of needs and wants through distribution. Distribution is a set of interdependent organization involved in the process of making a product or services available for the use of consumption by the consumer or business user. The distribution channel moves goods & services from producers to consumers. It overcomes the major time, place, & possession gaps that separate goods & services from those who would use them through direct marketing or indirect marketing channel. Thus, in achieving close relationship with the consumer is essential.

Lastly, the roles of technology have made a repertoire of customer service tools. They range from support websites & the ability to have live chats with technical staff to databases tracking individual customers’ preferences, pattern of buying, payment methods etc, & tailoring product & service reponses based on this advanced data. Specialist software that is designed for the tracking of services levels & for helping recognize areas for improvement are often integrated into our enterprise operational software such as ERP (Enterprice resource planning) software.

The satisfying consumer needs and wants is the second journey which involves focus on what the customer benefit is and what is learnt from the past. It also involves target market whereby selecting the target market consumers and the steps taken to satisfy their needs and wants.

The marketing mix must be in continuum and well co-ordinated in order to satisfy their needs and wants.

In the product phase, we must provide a good service or idea to satisfy the consumers’ needs by service strategy or customer-friendly systems.

The price phase connotes what is exchanged for the product.

The promotion phase indicate the means of communication between the seller & buyer.

Lastly, the place explains the means of getting the product into the consumers’ needs.