•  This essay is written by Omar Puebla and Gustav Perttilä

I found so many definitions of what is Marketing. I will quote some of them in my marketing description. Marketing is not just the act of selling, like the old school of buy me, buy me, buy me; nowadays, marketing is the sense of satisfying customers’ needs and building customer relationships.

Marketing is a social and managerial process by which individuals and organizations obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging value with others.

Marketing for me now is the art of satisfying customers’ needs and the process of building a relationship with the customers.

How do we find the right customers and market them our product or service? A good tool I have used many times is the business model canvas, especially the block of the customer segment, but I like to add the concept of the early adapters. In fact, this group is your fans’ number one because they believe in your product or service. They are the ones who understand you, going a little more deeply into this concept. Also, I like to add the idea of Seth Godin of tribes. I like to see this customer segmentation as a tribe. I love this concept cause it creates a more human feeling.

Suppose we understand our customers as a tribe and we are part of that tribe. In that case, we create the feeling we belong to the tribe, and it will be easier to understand the needs and wants of that tribe. The way we communicate our marketing will be different and more organic to our customers.

Taking the concept of the tribe into practice, we can profoundly understand the need and create value for our customers but bit a simple value, a value they are willing to pay well and follow you as their leader.

Marketing emphasizes creating customer relationships and how a good marketing strategy is to build the best customer relationship.

What better relationship than to see a satisfied customer and maintain a profitable customer relationship. This is marketing management. Marketing management aims to find, attract, keep, and grow customers by creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value.

Costumers satisfaction does not come from what the marketing says about the product. The experience the customer has with the product if the product or service matches with the customer’s expectations we have satisfied customers if the product or service exceeds the customer’s expectations will be the customer will be delighted or delighted which will lead to greater customer loyalty and, customer Loyalty is future revenue for your company.

Marketing is managing profitable customer relationships.

One example is H&M has become one of the leaders in clothing retailers by focusing on customer value- good design for a decent price. I kea did the same thing with home and furniture and accessories. Uber change the dominating taxi business, Airbnb, Wolt, Foodora. These Companies apply genuinely customer-oriented approaches, operate profitable business models, and do not hesitate to break with industry form.

H&M challenges the accepted industry, which had traditionally suggested that premium brand clothing should be sold in city centers and cheap clothing should be sold in shopping malls and outlets. Apple did a great job defining itself beyond the traditional consumer electronics industry.

Good marketing is critical to the success of every organization. No matter where they are, based on large for-profit firms or not-for-profit organizations such as colleges or hospitals.

Marketing is not just selling and advertising. Today marketing must be understood how a satisfy customer needs. If a marketer understands consumers’ needs, develops products that provide superior value to the customer and prices, and distributes and promotes them effectively, they are likely to sell easily.

In order words, great marketing creates an automatic demand for the products.

Understanding the difference between needs, wants, and demands.

Human needs are states of felt deprivation;

physical needs for food, clothing, warmth, safety.

Social needs for belonging, affection, love, intimacy, family, friends, relationships.

Safety and security needs about keeping us safe from harm; safety, shelter, security, law & order, employment, health, stability.

Wants are the from humans needs takes as they shaped by culture and individual personality, e.g., an Italian and German needs food, but ones want pasta or bratwurst.

Wants are shaped by one’s society and are described in terms of objects that will satisfy needs.

Demands become from wants, people demand products with benefits that add up to the most value and satisfaction.

Consumer needs and wants are fulfilled through the market offerings. Marketing is the combination of products, services, and experiences offered to a market to satisfy a need or want. But we need to be very careful to end up marketing myopia to make the mistake of paying more attention to the specifics product we offer than to the benefits and experiences produced by those products, these terms came from Theodor Levitt. They suggest that the railway companies are not in the railway business but the transportation business. They forget that a product is only a tool to solve a customer problem.

Maybe the customer doesn’t need a new drill machine, and perhaps they need a hole in the wall.

Customers value satisfaction from the expectation they have from the offers in the market, marketers must be careful to set the right level of expectation, if you set the expectations too low, maybe you only attract enough buyers. Still, you will not attract enough customers in the future, but if the expectations are too high, the buyer will be disappointed.

The concept of exchange and relationships lead to the concept of market. A market is a set of actual and potential buyers of a product. These buyers share a particular need or want that can be satisfied through exchange relationships.

Marketing means managing market and customers relationship. Creating those relationships takes work.

In conclusion, Marketing is the process of knowing the customer’s needs and wants of target markets and delivering the desired satisfaction better than competitors do. The job is not to find the right customers for your product but to find the right products for your customers.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory proposes that human motivation is based on different levels of needs. It even suggests that people are motivated to fulfill their needs in a hierarchical order. We start to fulfill the most basic needs and move on to other advanced needs. Self-actualization is the ultimate goal in the process. There are five different levels of needs that can be broadly categorized into deficiency and growth needs

1. PHYSIOLOGICAL NEEDS

Our most basic need is physical survival, which is why biological needs are more essential than anything else. It includes food, clothing, shelter, sleep and overall health among other things. Once these basic physiological and primary needs are met, you can move on to the other levels in the pyramid.

2. SAFETY NEEDS

Once your basic requirements are met, your needs start to become more complex. At the second level, security, safety and protection become mandatory. People want control over their lives and want to be prepared for any unanticipated risks. Safety needs include emotional stability, protection against crimes and harm, financial security and health security. For example, finding a job or moving to a gated community helps you feel safe and secure.

3. LOVE AND BELONGINGNESS NEEDS

This is the last of the deficient or basic needs. In this social layer of needs, you relate to human interaction and seek out emotional connections. Such needs include emotional and physical intimacy, friendships and family bonds and even workplace relationships. The need for interpersonal relationships and social contact are effective motivators. This stage is governed by friendship, trust, acceptance and intimacy.

4. ESTEEM NEEDS

This is the starting point for higher-level needs. The key ingredients of this stage are self-esteem and self-respect. The need for appreciation and respect becomes increasingly important as you continue to interact and expand your social networks. You want others to recognize your efforts and feel proud, accomplished and feel worthy.

The most popular examples of esteem needs include academic achievements, job opportunities and athletic participation. Maslow’s Need Theory divides this stage into two parts—esteem for oneself (e.g., independence) and respect from others (e.g., social prestige).

5. SELF-ACTUALIZATION NEEDS

This is the highest level or the end goal in Maslow’s Hierarchy Theory. Self-actualization means becoming the most that one can be. It describes the fulfillment of your true potential as an individual. You’ve accomplished everything that you were aspiring to achieve as you fully utilize your talents, abilities and potential. Self-actualizing people have high levels of self-awareness and don’t pay heed to what others have to say. They have broad goals to achieve and talent to tap into. Self-actualization needs include skill development, education, expanding your knowledge base and skill set.

There are multiple elements that need to be taken into consideration before something is going to be marketed. Marketing and branding are very intertwined with each other. They go hand in hand & there can’t be one without the other.  A big part of a company and what some could call “the face” is companies’ logo. When building a company from the ground up, the logo will be the first thing that people are looking at. Therefore, it’s crucial to have a proper logo from the get-go if it would be marketed in the future. There is a lot of different marketing aspects within a logo. At its best, a great logo can resonate with the customer and stir up emotions. Whenever businesses succeed to create emotions for a potential customer there is also the potential to make money out of it. What this means is that good branding can make the marketing for a company a lot easier down the road.

What’s important in marketing is knowing your customer base. It might be tricky at first to really break down the reality of one’s customers but it’s 100% worth doing so. When it’s done, we can start asking ourselves other questions. More specific ones that are aimed towards that niche group. By knowing customers’ needs and wants, targeted marketing can be done successfully. A highly respected author and lecturer by the name of Seth Godin has said that culture defeats everything. If you got culture at your back, what you’re doing should be easy. But if you’re trying to change the culture, it will be difficult. Unscrambling the word culture in this texture simply put means, “certain people doing certain things”. There are cultures all around us. In every sport, illness, behavior, workplace, and so on. All of us are involved in some culture or another, even if we haven’t realized it.

In every company with paying customers, there are expectations to be met. Those expectations are built during the early stages of a brand. What do the customers expect? This question can offer some proper clarity when it comes to marketing for them. What are their desires and needs? The psychological aspect of marketing if very intriguing. Why would one be willing to spend 50€ more on a product which is identical to the next one with the exception of the logo? There’s a spot-on quote from one of Seth Godin’s interviews that sums it all. He says:”  I’m not paying extra, you don’t have a brand” – Seth Godin

Marketing as a term can mean a lot of different things. it’s not just another word for reaching customers. Marketing is happening in every conversation one takes, whether it would be casual or strictly business orientated. It happens every time there’s any kind of persuasion going on. Whether it would be a salesman showing you an apartment or a friend asking to go out for lunch. Marketing is a big business function that is created out of smaller functions. Some of those for example are copywriting, social media, SEO, content marketing, pricing psychology, and so on. From what we can gather from this is that marketing is not that simple, and it includes a lot more than just one piece of the puzzle. As Adam Erhart said it: “ Marketing is not advertising but advertising is marketing “.

How to sell anything?

The keyword for this is four-lettered: MAYA – most advanced yet acceptable. There was a study made a couple of decades ago of which word are we humans most compelled to. The word was: novelty. Something new and exciting. Not risk-free nor guaranteed for life. What is surprising is that the study manages to invalidate another scientifically proven founding. According to a psychological phenomenon called “mere exposure effect”: the more exposure we give to certain things or people, the more pleasure we’ll find from those in the future. The motivation could be the feeling of trust, joy, or even pain. People seek and find the comfort of what is familiar to them.

This symptom reinforces the phenomenon of the “mere exposure effect”.  In practice it would go as follows: “people only like new things if they’re just like old things “– Derek Thompson. There needs to be a sense of familiarity when introducing anything new. Couple of years ago, Spotify introduced their new function called “discover weekly” where they introduced 30 new artists and songs. Initially, an error occurred because of a bug in the algorithm. It caused some of the famous artists to be on the discover week page. After noticing what had happened, Spotify quickly fixed the mistake. Something quite surprising happened though afterward. The customer engagement plummeted. There was a desperate need of seeing and hearing even a tiny amount of something familiar to the eye and ear. Only then, the new was accepted. From the Ted Talk on how to sell anything, Derek Thompson said it the best: “to sell that what is surprising, you need to get familiar”.

As previously mentioned, marketing exists in every aspect of the modern economic world.  One of the social aspects which marketing has affected is names. During the 1960s there was a major statistical spike for naming a child that ends with a prefix of “la or le” within the black community. This was a huge change, and it was unheard of. Names were beginning to sound distinguishably white or black. There was a spike of 8 main names at the time. From the first name to the last, each one was a pun from the earlier. There is a common path starting to form: “It takes the familiar and makes it surprising”.

Moral foundations theory is a social phycological theory that could be very helpful when trying to convince or come together on a disagreement. The conversation is started off by complimenting the good parts of the opposition’s topic at hand. Most times a “debate” is started by expressing a person’s own code of ethics.  What if we’d start the “debate” by favoring the counterpart’s first principles? The theory has shown that it’s always more beneficial to start off a debate in this style. It gives more room to slowly groom the opposition towards seeing your point of view.

References:

APA

Kotler, P., Armstrong, G. & Parment, A. (2016). Principles of marketing: Scandinavian edition. (second Scandinavian edition.) Harlow, England: Pearson.

Seth Godin, 2018, Everything you don’t know about marketing

Adam Erhart, 2019, Introduction to marketing – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sj2tbh-ozE

Raymon Loewey, 2018, Ted Talk, The four-letter word to selling anything – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pY7EjqD3QA