'Thank you for subscribing': Marketing is more than filling a gap

(The author is a Professor of
Management and Economics, formerly at IIBM (RBI) Guwahati. He can be contacted at m.bibhas@gmail.com)

Dr. Boidurjo Rick Mukhopadhyay

(The author, international
award-winning development and
management economist, formerly
a Gold Medalist in Economics
at Gauhati University)

''We all live by selling something." Marketing is fundamentally something that we all do. It is also something that would enable a firm to obtain a competitive advantage when they are able to study, identify, create, and communicate reasons of preference for their customers, with respect to their competitors. Companies sell their goods and use their benefits to buy raw materials and equipments needed to produce goods further, making a profit along the way. Nations exchange their goods for the needed goods of other nations.

Essentially therefore, marketing refers to the very exchange process: how transactions are initiated, motivated, facilitated as well as consummated. So, the focus remains very much on marketing strategies based on market driving capabilities and resources. At the same time, marketing management deals with how organizations and people can improve their exchange activities to produce more income for themselves and more activities for others. Thus, any organization that creates genuine consumer satisfaction usually succeeds (or at least should consider this as a measure of success) in achieving the organizational goals.

The core tasks, therefore, remain: identifying customer needs, developing want-satisfying products and services, and delivering value to customers. For example, Kodak as it once met the need for inexpensive reliable cameras very well, and now diversified its product lines for CGI, Dolby and Production House equipment. Chase a need, identify the gap, fill it, and at the same time - create value and develop a competitive advantage. The aim is to know and understand the customer so well that the products or services fit him and sells. To have successful marketing we, thus, have to look at: needs, wants, demands, products, exchange transactions and market's nature. And today, AI, deep learning, machine learning all come to aid to help marketers know a particular market, target demographics up, close, and also personal.

Interestingly, sellers often confuse between needs and wants. For example, the drill manufacturer thinks that the customer needs drill bits. While actually, the customer wants a hole. Some marketers or/and sellers focus on existing wants and lose sight of underlying customer needs. Some needs and wants are more subtle than they may appear on the surface. If a new product comes along, that serves the need better or cheaper, and the customer will have the same need but a new want. And of course, for products that are mainly innovative will have both novelty and utility value.

Today, an increasing focus on marketing is intensifying in various sectors regardless of whether it is consumer, business, e-business (e.g., etails), international or non-profit. An increasing number of organizations do fundamentally recognise how mar­keting can attribute to improve organizational performance. How­ever, the emergence of marketing in services sector is a relatively recent phenomenon. Let us produce 'what the producer thinks, the market wants, and the sales department will manage to sell'. This was the previous thinking. Liberalization, Privatization, and Globalization call for transmission of information – this has remained an ongoing process, and even more so for those markets where LPG started late. Adding to that, the use and growth of social media in communication has further shrunk the world into a global village. Universal connectivity is the talk of the town and calls for increasing the efficiency the efficacy and productivity. For example, "bank anywhere anytime" is now a slogan and therefore, the complaints regarding physical queues at the counter have also faded.

Naturally then, the professionals and technologists have to find out the ways, which make possible quantitative as well as qualitative improvements in the services paving the way for efficient market­ing of products. However, marketing is purely consumer-oriented. It starts as well as ends with consumers. Price, advertisement, convenience and accessibility are some of the factors influencing the mar­keting of services. On top of this comes the personalised approach based on skill vis quality. In a market that is fiercely competitive, the efforts are on by every seller to have a niche in the market. All are vying each other to have a greater market share and naturally the winning post is occupied by that producer-seller who could offer the best in the market.

Customer satisfaction is a buzz word. Not only the urban section but for the rural counterpart too, the race is there for netting in the customers (between public sector, private sector and foreign banks). The very starting point on this score is that whether you have the tools and equipments, personnel, authority or informa­tion needed to serve clients. On top of that, what is your mindset? It is even more relevant when the play­ground is a country like India- with 5,000 years of history behind, a five-decade young nation and the largest democracy in the world having second largest volume of human resource.

Time is ripe to reassess whether you are a 'lower' (individu­alistic), 'member' (like to be with others) and leader of a team. Doers and thinkers are there, they may or may not be the same person. Integrators combine both of them. Henry Mintzberg's 10 managerial roles can be read for more. There is also a rare breed who can balance thinking and doing, and hence can reach the top. Since we are living in a period of tumultuous and rapid change, you will have to keep changing directions like a wind surfer who adjust both direction and speed based on the wind and the waves.

We learn by doing. Learning is a journey without a final destination. For developing skills and abilities, no end could be located. The advent of IT has forced us to virtually begin "yet again". Importantly, "programmability" is the new corporate capability to produce more and more varieties and choices for customers—even to offer each individual customer the chance to design and implement the "programme" that will yield the precise product, service, or variety that is right for him or her. The technological promise of programmability has exploded into the reality of almost unlimited choice. Twenty years ago, IBM had only 20 competitors; today it faces more than 5,000, when you count any company that is in the "computer" business. Twenty years ago, there were fewer than 90 semiconductor companies; today there are almost 300 in the United States alone.

Several decades ago, there were sales-driven companies. These organizations focused their energies on changing customers' minds to fit the product—practicing the "any colour as long as it's black" school of marketing. As technology developed and competition increased, some companies shifted their approach and became customer driven. These companies expressed a new willingness to change their product to fit customers' requests—practicing the "tell us what colour you want" school of marketing.

To conclude - in marketing, words and sense score most of the goals, Confucius said: "Without knowing the force of words it is impossible to know men." Truly, words are what hold societies together. That is why marketing is everyone's job, why marketing is everything and equally how everything is marketing.