MARKETING

Marketing is a study of the market involving all the activities concerned with obtain and keeping customers. That means: identifying and satisfying the consumers' demand for a company product.

Companies need to know what to produce and so they must find out the goods and services people want. So they use market research. The basic steps in a market research can be represented by the following questions:

• Who are the potential customers of a product?
• Who are the actual buyers of it?
• How often do customers buy it?
• Why do they buy it?
• Where do they buy it?
• How did they find out about it?

In a market research companies can use existing information (records, statistics, Chambers of Commerce, banks, telephone call).

Large firms make survey through their own marketing departments and specialized staff while medium and small firms usually hire the services of companies and agencies specialized in marketing studies.

Companies must meet their customers' requirements by supplying the market with the right product, available at the right price, in the right package and at the right price.

The strategy is the four P's:

• PRODUCT: selection and development of product. This is to develop a new product or improve an existing one in order to satisfy the customers' requirements.
• PRICE: determination of price. It is based on the demand of the product and the cost for its production and other elements like competition, cost of promotion .
• PLACE: selection of distribution channels. This involves choosing the channels of distribution in order to find the best way to get the product to consumers.
• PROMOTION: generating demand for the advertising product. This includes all the way of advertising, selling and public relations to inform the potential customers about the products or services of a company and to encourage them to buy or use them.

ADVERTISING

Advertising is a sort of communication and means informing consumers about the qualities of a product through channels of information. It consists in a form of promotion that aims to bring a product to the attention of consumers.

Companies advertise for two reasons: to INFORM and to PERSUADE. In the first case advertising is used to supply potential consumers with information about goods or services. In the second case companies try to persuade potential buyers to choose a certain brand of goods.