The Management of Markets - Essay Example

There are various companies that base their selection decisions on superficial, spontaneous, and incomplete analyses. The firms are free to limit their definitions of the market to the product application strictly or on a customer basis. A firm’s strategic and tactical planning, whether small or large, is impacted by the market decision. There has been a great search (3) for the existence of new paradigms which has become the greatest mode of acquiring both theoretical and methodological opportunities within the discipline of marketing.

Similarly, marketing (4) can be defined as the means of promoting products like that of branding and advertising. But on the professional front, it includes the wider meaning of marketing which recognizes it as being customer-centered. Products are so designed so as to satisfy the desires of the customers or sometimes made for special customers. Marketing can be divided into four general kinds of activities. They are the product, pricing, promotion, and distribution or placement.

• Product marketing or product management is linked with the specifications of the actual service or the good, and how it proves to be helpful to the wants and needs of the end-user.
• Pricing points to the process by which a particular cost is assigned to the product, along with the discounts.
• Promotion refers to sales promotion, publicity, personal promotion, and advertising and also includes all the means of promoting the various brand, products, or commodities.
• Distribution or placement of a product is the process by which the product reaches the customer.

These four general kinds of activities are called the marketing mix. There is a theory (5) relating to the structure of market areas known as the gravity theory. According to the theory, the number of purchases by the customers and the frequency or rate of their going to the shops or outlets is very efficiently related to the magnitude of the shop or store and the distance between the shop and the starting point of the shopping spree.