Understanding Marketing Management

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As philip kotler says "Marketing management is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing and promotion and distribution of goods, services and ideas to create exchanges with target groups that satisfy customer and organizational objectives"

Thus, Marketing Management is a functional area of business management which has to deal with the consumers' needs and wants in the first place, followed by promotion and pricing to create specific demand for the goods or services or idea in question, and then flow of goods or services or ideas to the customer and finally information from the customers about expected satisfaction.

 

Steps in Marketing Management Process :

1. Setting Marketing Objectives : The process of marketing management starts with the activity of setting objectives. The organizational mission provides the priorities for scanning the environment and finding out the opportunities. 
2. Analyzing marketing opportunities : This involves analysis of opportunities in the light of company strengths and weaknesses - both internal and external. The task may be to analyze long run opportunities or short run opportunities or even medium term. 
• To identify and evaluate its opportunities there is the requirements of a reliable information system. This, helps the companies know the needs and wants of their customer, their locations, buying and social practices and so on.
3. Researching and Selecting Target Market : Now the firm is ready to research the select markets. It needs to know how to measure attractiveness of any given market. Marketing people must understand the major techniques for measuring market potential and forecasting future demand.
• These become the key in deciding which markets and new products to focus on. Modern marketing concept cares for dividing the markets into smaller segments, evaluating the selecting and targeting certain ones and deciding on the company's positioning on each market. 
4. Designing Marketing Strategies : The marketing strategy spells out the game plan for attaining the business' objectives or product / market objective. Marketing strategy may be defined as "Marketing strategy defines the broad principle by which the business unit expects to achieve its marketing objectives in a target market. It consists of basic decisions on total marketing expenditure, marketing mix and marketing allocation"
• The four P's of marketing management - Product, Price, Promotion and Place and these are decided and directed at the consumers on the basis of proper diagnosis of firm-market system arrived through the process of marketing research.
• The company has also to decide how to divide the total marketing budget among the various tools of marketing mix. 
5. Planning Marketing Programmes :  It is not enough to formulate only the broad strategies by which the business expects to achieve its marketing objective but also plan the supporting marketing mix programmes. Without such programmes even the best conceived marketing strategies may fail.
• Decisions have to be taken regarding the features, packaging, branding, servicing policies, etc. of the product, the wholesale and retail prices, discounts, allowances and credit terms, the identification, recruitment and linking of various marketing facilitators so that its products and services are efficiently supplied to the target market, advertising, sale, promotions, publicity etc.,
6. Organizing, Implementing and Controlling the Marketing Efforts : The final stage in the marketing management process is organizing  the marketing resources and implanting and controlling the marketing plan. The company is required to design a marketing organization that will be able to degenerate the marketing plan up to work, i.e., implementing its marketing organization is typically headed by marketing vice-president, who performs two tasks.
• First he / she co-ordinates the work of marketing personnel and secondly, he / she has to work closely with the Vice-presidents of finance, production, R and D, purchasing, personnel to Co-ordinate company efforts to satisfy customers. The marketing Vice-president's job is to make sure that all the company departments collaborate to fulfill the company's marketing promise to the customers. 

Bhavya Vasudevn

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