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Marketing
Marketing to organizations can be a catapult to success or can be a detriment to success. People's perceptions of marketing can very depending upon who you talk to. Engineers might think that there is no need for marketing because the product will sell without fancy packaging and advertising. Operations may feel that marketing is just another expense that the organization must bear to keep product flowing through the factory. People may only understand marketing as putting a product or service into a neat little package and selling the product to a consumer. According to the American Marketing Association "Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customers relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders" (Anonymous, 2004). Over the years I have worked very closely with the marketing department at my previous employer and these conceived perceptions are not what marketing is about. Peter Drucker says it best "Marketing and innovation are the two chief functions of business. You get paid for creating a customer, which is marketing. And you get paid for creating a new dimension of performance, which is innovation. Everything else is a cost center" (Cohn, Unknown). I view marketing as the means by which a company determines what product or service the company is going to sell; How much are they going to sell the product for; Who is the company going to sell the product to; How do they get the message out to who is going to buy the product.
Marketing strategy consists of segmentation, targeting, positioning and is supported by the marketing mix or the "price, p ...