ABSTRACT
The concept of marketing can be quite confusing to those who are unfamiliar with business, management, and economics. They might wonder: what is the difference between marketing and sales? Is there anything else that marketing can do other than advertise? Why and in what way is marketing related to economics? Marketing researchers have analyzed these important issues in great detail over the past 50 years. Even though they have come up with quite a number of well-formulated and well-founded theories, these theories are sometimes rather difficult to read and understand for most of us. To put it in the simplest terms: marketing is an intermediary, helping supply to meet demand on the market. Without marketing processes and activities, transaction costs may become too high, leaving all parties involved in the transaction process without ever reaching an agreement. Obviously, marketing has other effects as well, though this is perhaps the most critical one. In short, marketing creates both a virtual and a physical marketplace, and then has demand meet supply in these marketplaces, which is the basic principle of business operations and of economic theory. In this chapter, we discuss essential airline marketing strategies. Researchers may find interesting and most up-to-date topics in each of the sections, which might have value for further studies.
