Marketing Delivers Value

Products don’t sell themselves. Good marketing educates customers so that they can find the products they want, make better choices about those products, and extract the most value from them. In this way, marketing facilitates exchanges between buyers and sellers for the mutual benefit of both parties. Marketing also provides people with information and helps them make healthier decisions for themselves and for others.

Not only does marketing deliver value to customers, but that value also translates into the value of the firm as it develops a reliable customer base and increases its sales and profitability. So when we say that marketing delivers value, value is being delivered to both the customer and the company. Marketing finishes the job by ensuring that what is delivered is valuable.

Of course, all business students should understand all functional areas of the firm, including marketing. There is more to marketing, however, than simply understanding its role in the business. Marketing has a tremendous impact on society.

Justifying Marketing Costs

Marketing can sometimes be the largest expense associated with producing a product. In the soft drink business, marketing expenses account for about one-third of a product’s price—about the same as the ingredients used to make the soft drink itself. At the bottling and retailing level, the expenses involved in marketing a drink to consumers like you and me make up the largest cost of the product.

Some people argue that society does not benefit from marketing when it represents such a huge chunk of a product’s final price. In some cases, that argument is justified. Yet when marketing results in more informed consumers receiving a greater amount of value, the cost is justified.

Marketing Offers People Career Opportunities

Marketing is the interface between producers and consumers. In other words, it is the one function in the organization in which the entire business comes together. Being responsible for making money for your company and delivering satisfaction to your customers makes marketing a great career. In addition, because marketing can be such an expensive part of a business and is so critical to its success, companies actively seek good marketing people. There are a wide variety of jobs available in the marketing profession. The positions below represent only a few of the opportunities available in marketing:

• Marketing research. Personnel in marketing research are responsible for studying markets and customers in order to understand what strategies or tactics might work best for firms.
• Merchandising. In retailing, merchandisers are responsible for developing strategies regarding what products wholesalers should carry to sell to retailers such as Target and Walmart.
• Sales. Salespeople meet with customers, determine their needs, propose offerings, and make sure that the customer is satisfied. Sales departments can also include sales support teams who work on creating the offering.
• Advertising. Whether it’s for an advertising agency or inside a company, some marketing personnel work on advertising. Television commercials and print ads are only part of the advertising mix. Many people who work in advertising spend all their time creating advertising for electronic media, such as websites, and their pop-up ads, podcasts, and the like.
• Product development. People in product development are responsible for identifying and creating features that meet the needs of a firm’s customers. They often work with engineers or other technical personnel to ensure that value is created.
• Direct marketing. Professionals in direct marketing communicate directly with customers about a company’s product offerings via channels such as e-mail, chat lines, telephone, or direct mail.
• Digital marketing. Digital marketing professionals combine advertising, direct marketing, and other areas of marketing to communicate directly with customers via social media, the Internet, and mobile media. They also work with statisticians to determine which consumers receive which message and with IT professionals to create the right look and feel of digital media.
• Event marketing. Some marketing personnel plan special events to orchestrate face-to-face conversations with potential and current customers in a special setting.
• Nonprofit marketing. Nonprofit marketers often don’t get to do everything listed previously as nonprofits typically have smaller budgets. But their work is always important as they try to change behaviours without having a product to sell.

A career in marketing can begin in a number of different ways. Entry-level positions for new university graduates are available in many of the positions previously mentioned.

To review the different areas for careers in marketing, click on the hotspots in the picture below:

Which area appeals to you and why? To answer this question, learn about specific skills for some examples of careers in marketing.

Criticisms of Marketing

Marketing is not without its critics. We already mentioned that one reason to study marketing is because it is costly, and business leaders need to understand the cost/benefit ratio of marketing to make wise investments. Yet that cost is precisely why some criticize marketing. If that money could be put into the research and development of new products, perhaps the consumers would be better satisfied. Or, some critics argue, prices could be lowered. Marketing executives, though, are always on the lookout for less expensive ways to have the same performance and do not intentionally waste money on marketing.

Another criticism is that marketing creates wants among consumers for products and services that aren’t really needed. For example, fashion marketing creates demand for designer jeans when much less expensive jeans can fulfill the same basic function. Taken to the extreme, consumers may take on significant credit card debt to satisfy wants created by marketing, with serious negative consequences. When marketers target their messages carefully so an audience that can afford such products is the only group reached, such extreme consequences can be avoided.

Marketing’s Role in the Organization

Marketing is also a functional area in companies, just like operations and accounting are. Within a company, marketing might be the title of a department, but some marketing functions, such as sales, might be handled by another department. Marketing activities do not occur separately from the rest of the company.

Pricing an offering, for example, will involve a company’s finance and accounting departments in addition to the marketing department. Similarly, a marketing strategy is not created solely by a firm’s marketing personnel; instead, it flows from the company’s overall strategy. We’ll discuss strategy much more completely in chapter 2.1 “Components of the strategic planning process.”