Marketing has been known as one of the core tools used in business to ensure demand and supply are balanced. Through marketing businesses and organizations are assured that their products and services and identified and utilized which in return ensures continued operations and survival. The main benefits of marketing are to ensure that a company gains a market niche, sensitization of the target consumer of the products and/or services available as well as satisfaction of a consumer need.
Marketing can be performed by producers, consumers, intermediaries (retailers and wholesalers) or marketing collaborators (firms specializing in marketing other than buying or selling e.
g. advertising agencies). Marketing may therefore be expounded as a company tool with functions that ensure a product or service being provided by a company or organization reaches the target consumer to satisfy need. Marketing 1. Discuss the universal functions of marketing and those functions that would apply to the products/services provided by a fictitious firm of your choosing
Though best performed by a specialist – an intermediary between the producer and consumer – well versed with trade rather than production, marketing function maybe undertaken by both the producer and consumer.
One marketing function is buying which involves sourcing and scrutinizing of products or services to ensure they are quality and to satisfy a need or needs. Selling on the other hand involves the use of direct or mass selling processes to promote the product. To ensure that products or services get to the target consumer or are stored till the consumer needs them, the transportation and storing functions comes to play respectively.
In order to ensure easy buying and selling by minimizing inspection and sampling, marketers employ the standardization and grading function that involves sorting products according to size and quality. To facilitate production, storage, transportation, promotion, sale and purchase of products the financing function must be employed.
When all this is done there has to be the risk taking function in place to ensure that all uncertainties pertaining to the marketing process are well covered e. g. the uncertainty of whether a product will be accepted and purchased by the target consumer, theft, damage e. t. c. Finally, to ensure production and marketing goals are met, the market information function is put in place for the collection, analysis and distribution of all information needed to plan, undertake and ensure control of marketing processes locally and internationally if exporting. Taking Wal-Mart as an example, all these function would have to be employed to ensure a flawless growth of the market niche.