International marketing

Having made a product the problem becomes to find someone who will buy it. It’s the responsibility of the marketing department to promote and organize the sale of products to the purchaser. Broadly speaking, activities such as sales promotion, advertising and market research are covered. It would be possible for the factory simply to produce a motor car and then hope that it sells. However, it takes a long time to set up a production line for a car assembly plant and even minor modification can prove difficult. It’s much better to discover what people are looking for when they buy a car and then try to satisfy their needs.

It becomes obvious that making and selling are 2 facets of the same undertaking. The marketing manager and the production manager are 2 members of the same team, depending on each other in much the same ways as the players in the Liverpool football team. This situation could be compared to the marketing team who make great efforts to find customer for their cars, only to find the cars cannot be delivered on time, or that the cars develop faults as soon as they arrive.

The problem facing any business is that the market for goods and services is ever changing. Take the case of a company manufacturing cigarettes (damage for health).

New technologies have an even more devastating effect on the markets. Once upon a time there was a very successful company which made gas mantles.

The rapidly changing world is both a headache and an exciting challenge to those engaged in marketing. If they predict correctly their business will survive and prosper. If they misread the sings the business will fail and, perhaps more importantly for all of us, valuable economic resources will be wasted.

People have been trying to sell things for years, and you’ve learned something about their techniques – advertisements, price markdowns, special contests, tantalizing displays of merchandise. But despite marketing’s high visibility, the term itself is difficult to define. The American Marketing Association recently devoted a year of study to the question and evaluated 25 different definitions before reaching a consensus on the meaning of the word. According to its definition, marketing is planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchange that satisfy individual and organizational objectives. Marketing is a broad term, not limited to profit-making business alone; it encompasses the efforts of nonprofit organizations to “sell” intangibles.