Marketing is a most interesting topic. You could write a fat book on it and many people have. We should begin with a definition.
That raises a problem as there are a few definitions some of the complex and others simplistic.
For discussion purposes lets consider marketing as the process of identifying potential areas of demand in the economy, creating a product or service to fill that demand, advertising it and selling it to the market. A lot of very intelligent people are involved in the process from engineers to scientists, mathematicians, designers, accountants, lawyers, factory workers, models, photographers, advertising staff, sales staff and layers of support staff. One might hope that with all this collected intellect that bullshit would not enter this process. Wrong.
One of major challenges is price. Here is the problem. For a given product or service there is a maximum price once can sell it at that will attract a certain portion of the market and then a lower price which will attract the rest of the potential market. The lower prices will eventually drop to the point where they are lower than the actual unit cost however sufficient profit has been made in earlier sales to allow this if it is deemed advantageous -for example as a loss leader or keeping or obtaining market share or promoting customer loyalty. Now how does one sell essentially the same product or service at different prices? Clearly the people who paid higher prices would be pissed off and the even the people who paid lower prices would be confused. The marketing process can solve these types of problems.
Branding is one way to solve the problem of different prices. Certain brands have been established in the market place as being associated with higher prices and higher levels of quality. In electronics Sony has a good reputation. Sanyo has less of a reputation. Unknown brands have lower expectations in the market place. Often integrated circuits will have abilities that are not accessed and in fact the rascals in the CPU market actually took perfectly good chips and disabled certain parts of them to be able to use the same chip for more than one market segment.
Some Chinese factories have been known to produce a product for a brand name and then make a few more thousand copies under another name which are usually sold at a lower price and thus directly compete with the name brand product. We are talking seriously dirty pool here but that's how the Chinese operate -they don't follow the same rules manufactures in other parts of the world follow. They will also sell to anybody thus you can order a container load of product for your market area only to find out that the silly buggers have turned around and sold another container load of the same product to buddy down the road and you then have a huge problem moving the stock. Nice. The customer eventually pays for this sort of bullshit in the distribution system as it results in higher costs. But its all called marketing. And in case you haven't noticed China is laughing all the way to the bank and has the largest trade surplus of any nation on the planet.
In the gasoline market it was noted that the same tanker was filling up different brands filling stations. Pretty funny eh! As each gas brand claimed to be the best! People were actually paying more for the brands that claimed they were better but it was all coming out of the same truck! Bullshit!
To explain marketing and many other business concepts I requested that the Corporate Secretary Miss Farsea write a tell all book. She did a great job and it explains in 420 pages of easy and humorous reading how to operate a profitable business in Canada or anywhere else for that matter. For more info please visit here. (This is an example of marketing and in this case its an excellent product but without marketing nobody will know about it)
In Canada one of the wizards of marketing is Canadian Tire. They really are impressive. You can wander into one of their stores and sure enough there will be some item you want at a very deep discount. I went in recently and saw a laser level at 72% off. I had to have it! I had visited the store to look for an outdoor thermometer for the house! And they are clever. They will cheerfully sell you a socket set at deep discount and when you loose a socket as we all do they will just as cheerfully sell you a replacement socket at ten times the price you want to pay! Brilliant because now you need the damn thing. They have a type of system where they place an item on deep discount once or twice a year and if you can wait for it you save big time. This causes customers to come back frequently. They also charge outrageous amounts of interest on their credit cards (25.99% when prime is under 5%) so that even if you purchase items at deep discounts they still make lots of money off you if you don't pay off your card every month and few do. Canadian Tire understands Marketing. In reality they should be called China Tire because that's where the majority of their products are manufactured but even there -they understand marketing.
Marketing itself is not bullshit. However there can be a lot of in the marketing process so its buyer beware. If you understand some of the basics of marketing you can make it work for you and save a lot of money. A re-positioning cruise is one good example. Waiting for the Canadian tire item to go on deep discount is another.
You may have heard that pretty girls, babies and puppies are used a lot in marketing because they grab your attention and cause a positive response which is then associated with the product. Some of you will actually not believe this but it is true. Some ads will use all three! Beer commercials are the most blatant but they work.
Here are some good links which will provide you with additional information on Marketing. In Many cases it will be worth your while to invest a bit of research time into this subject. Marketing is a fact of life for all of us but often we are not aware of how it impacts us.
Wikipedia link on Marketing -good intro to topic
Marketing Magazine Despite the fact this site starts with an annoying in your face ad (but go figure its a marketing magazine) there is still a lot of good content here on marketing in Canada
Canadian Marketing Association Good source of information note it is sponsored by some of the largest marketers in Canada
International Internet Marketing Association Took a quick look at this one and there is useful information here regarding internet marketing with some good links
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