What is marketing

Marketing can appear to be a luxury that no business can afford. Marketing can also appear to be "fluffy" and just for high powered executives that enjoy expensive lunches in high class hotels.

But real marketing should be at the heart of every business as marketing is about your customers and what they want from you.

In this article we show you what marketing really is and how you can use it to improve your business success and profits.

So what is marketing?

Marketing in its broadest form is "identifying and satisfying customer needs at a profit"

Notice there is no mention of communications or expensive lunches!

Marketing is all about customers. Customers buy products and services. Customers generate profits. It's people like you and me that you need to focus your efforts on.

The only reason someone buys something is to satisfy a need they have at that moment in their life. And you need to focus on that customer need even before you try to sell your products and services.

Identifying the customer need

So what exactly is this customer need ?

As an example, let's take a "ready meal" that's sold every day in the supermarket.

The ready meal is designed to serve the purpose of providing a complete meal to satisfy hunger and provide a meal in minutes thus saving time preparing and cooking a convential meal.

It saves time by not having to prepare anything and not needing to purchase all the individual ingredients and put them together by following a recipe. It's all done for you.

The customer need is "I need to satisfy my hunger now and I don't have the time (or don't want to) prepare and cook my meal.

If you can break this "need" down for your customers you are not only closer to understanding why customers will buy from you but probably ahead of most of your competitors because they are unlikely to go through this process.

Dividing customers into target groups

Although you may have found the exact customer need there will be many types of customer in this group that have different demographic profiles.

You should now imagine the different types of customers that have this need and divide them into smaller groups based upon their age, geographic area, professional status, income group and so on.

By breaking down the overall need by customer profile means you'll be able to focus your communication activities much tigher rather than trying to sell to everyone and communcating to people who don't have the need you are satisfying.

So if we take the "ready meal" example from above you might have the following customer profiles:

• At home mums - too busy because they are looking after their children
• Full time workers who have a long commute and get home late at night
• People going out in the evening after work need something quick before they meet with friends or going to the gym etc)
• City workers that eat at their desk

There are probably a few more but this should give you an idea of how to profile your customer groups. Not every company will be targeting the same segments so you'll be able to start off in a niche market to see how well your product or service sells.

Additionally by doing the above analysis you may find groups of customers you never thought about before that offer opportunities for your business.

That's the basic premise of marketing - focusing on your customer need and understanding their demographic profile.

But do you see how marketing should be at the heart of every business, every business plan and every decision a company makes?

The next marketing lesson looks at how to satisfy the customers need then we'll move onto communications.

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