Marketing
A useful definition of marketing is ‘seeing the world through the eyes of the customer’. Many companies suffer from an internal orientation, by focusing for example on the characteristics of the products they sell, rather than the actual needs of their customers. Marketers try to avoid this internal focus by taking the perspective of the customer in everything they do.
The field of marketing has been in existence for around 100 years, and several of the original ideas have stood the test of time. One is the so-called 4 Ps of marketing, which defines the key elements – product, place, price, promotion – that need to be taken into account when developing a marketing strategy. Another is the product life cycle – the notion that every product goes through a cycle from launch to growth and maturity and then to decline. By understanding this life cycle, you can make better decisions about how to position and price your products in a competitive market.
Marketing has also moved forward, and there have been many recent advances in thinking, often driven by the emergence of more sophisticated ways of capturing and analysing information about customer behaviour.
Notions of segmentation and personalised marketing have developed a lot over the last 20 years. The emphasis has shifted from ‘mass-market’ advertising through targeting of specific segments of the market, to a focus on personalised marketing, where each individual can be targeted as a function of his or her internet usage. Pricing strategies likewise have shifted over the years, from a standard price for all, through differentiation according to customer segments, and now towards dynamic pricing, where prices fluctuate according to changes in supply and demand, often in real time. The channels through which products are sold have also evolved, and today the emphasis, especially for digital products, has shifted to multichannel marketing, which is a way of creating a coherent offering across multiple media at the same time.