ABSTRACT
Marketing is an essential part of good management practice. It is a process of identifying customer needs, wants and wishes, and satisfying them. Sport and leisure services and facilities depend on satisfied customers or they go out of business. Marketing involves creating appropriate goods and services and matching them to market requirements. Therefore, far from being just about selling, marketing is from the beginning an integral part of the business process. Marketing does the following:
assesses the needs and wants of potential customers;●● analyses the internal organisational and external market environments;●● segments the market appropriately;●● positions the product in the market;●● implements a number of decisions, termed the ‘marketing mix’;●● secures appropriate relationships with customers;●● analyses, evaluates and adjusts.●●
However, marketing is as relevant to not-for-profit organisations, in the private and public sectors, as it is to the commercial profit-making sector. Any providers should be motivated to supply their customers with what these customers want. In the commercial world, marketing has proved to be an effective means of staying in business and making greater profits. For leisure services in the public and voluntary sectors, it can help to achieve a more complex set of objectives. The common link is the customer, because it is through satisfying customers that any organisational objectives are achieved. As Chapter 17 makes clear, the essence of quality management is satisfying customers.
