Marketing

Marketing is the study and management of exchange relationships. The American Marketing Association has defined marketing as "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."

The techniques used in marketing include choosing target markets through market analysis and market segmentation, as well as understanding methods of influence on the consumer behavior.

From a societal point of view, marketing provides the link between a society's material requirements and its economic patterns of response. This way marketing satisfies these needs and wants through the development of exchange processes and the building of long-term relationships.

In the case of nonprofit organization marketing, the aim is to deliver a message about the organization's services to the applicable audience. Governments often employ marketing to communicate messages with a social purpose, such as a public health or safety message, to citizens.

(Also, see History of marketing)

Marketing theorists identify a number of distinct orientations - the production orientation, the product orientation, the selling orientation and the marketing orientation. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English describes the term, 'orientation' as "the type of activity or subject that an organization seems most interested in and gives most attention to." In relation to marketing orientations, the concept has been defined as a "philosophy of business management." ; "a corporate state of mind" or as an "organisation[al] culture"

Such an orientation may suit scenarios in which a firm holds dead stock, or otherwise sells a product that is in high demand, with little likelihood of changes in consumer tastes that would diminish demand.

Recent approaches in marketing include relationship marketing which focuses on the consumer, business marketing or industrial marketing which focuses on an organisation or institution and social marketing with focus on benefits to society. Newer forms of marketing also use the Internet and are therefore called Internet marketing or more generally e-marketing, online marketing, 'digital marketing', search engine marketing, or 'desktop advertising'. It attempts to perfect the segmentation strategy used in traditional marketing. It targets its audience more precisely, and is sometimes called personalized marketing or one-to-one marketing. 'Direct marketing' is used by those organisations, such as insurance services and health clubs, that have a defined customer or membership base they wish to develop strong, on-going relationships with via personalized communications – traditionally through 'direct mail' (postal) communications and more recently, via e-mail. Additionally, direct marketing will employ broadcast mechanisms such as press, print, or television campaigns with a strong call to action to attract new customers or members. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to be broad in scope, because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail, wireless media as well as driving audiences from traditional marketing methods like radio and billboard to internet properties or a landing page.

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Wikipedia