Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3750 words

Marketing - Essay Example Marketing has been defined differently by various authors. As per Eztel, Walker and Stanton (2003), ‘Marketing is a total system of business activities designed to plan, price, promote, and distribute want-satisfying products to target markets in order to achieve organisational objectives’. On the other hand, Kotler (2003) defines marketing as ‘a societal process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering, and freely exchanging products and services of value with each others’. These two definitions provide significant insight into the main operations of marketing, vis-Ã  -vis planning, pricing, promotion and distribution. The American Marketing Association provides another definition of marketing as ‘the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organisational goals’ (Bennett, 1995). There are three main eras through which marketing has evolved as a revolutionary concept and has taken its current form. These include product orientation period (Eztel, Walker and Stanton, 2003) in which demand were greater than supply, manufacturing and production were limited and industries were not fully developed or capable to take care of the needs of the market. In this period, the main focus of the companies were on producing large quantities of products to satisfy the ever more increasing wants and needs of the target market. Little, if at all, efforts were used to be put in the marketing of products through searching the customers. This was followed by sale orientation stage (Eztel, Walker and Stanton, 2003). In this period, customers used to have relatively lower purchasing power, hence companies began hard selling through overly aggressive advertising and heavy reliance on promotional activities. In the post world war II era of 1950s and onwards, market orientation has emerged as