ABSTRACT
Marketing is the intermediary between the customer and the business. The marketing department strives to profoundly understand the customer to develop a product or service which the customer will want. Once that information is gathered, that information is transferred to the business, which in turn produces a product according to those specifications. Once a product has been created, the marketing department is responsible for communicating to the consumer the benefits of the product, and points out how their product differs from the competition. For example, walk into any grocery store and pay close attention to the different brands of pasta sauces. Not only can you buy plain tomato sauce, you can buy varieties blended with peppers, mushrooms or a mélange of herbs. Each variant offers the consumer something the others do not. Emphasizing the differences between choices and the value the consumer will receive is the essence of marketing. Of course, the value received goes beyond the physical product. It includes the meaning of the product’s brand. Many consumers will pay more for a Coke than for a generic brand of cola, even if they often cannot tell the difference in taste. Clearly the brand offers a set of benefits that extend far beyond the attributes of their product. We will take a closer look at brands later but for now we will only state that
those products that add meaning and experience truly differentiate themselves in the mind of customers. In the introduction we defined management as a set of activities to help an organization realize a stated goal by maximizing limited resources. Following that definition we define marketing management as the administering of the process of satisfying consumer needs while ensuring the company makes a profit.
