ABSTRACT
Traditionally, it has been assumed that a professional marketer focuses principally on the task of creating and maintaining demand for certain goods and services. As pointed out by Kotler (1973), and subsequently revisited by the same author 20 years later (Kotler, 1993), this is only a limited perspective regarding the different marketing challenges faced by organizations. From a broader point of view, marketing management can be understood to be a question of regulating the level, timing and character of demand for one or more products of an organization. In general, a company’s desired level of demand is considered to be based on profit optimization: that is to say, sales maximization subject to a profit constraint, satisfying the current or desired level of supply or some other type of analysis (Kotler, 1973).
