Marketing key role

Last updated: October 2016

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Marketing Key Role:

Marketing is a very important business function. It is extremely difficult (if not impossible) for a company to survive in today’s fiercely competitive business world without implementing appropriate and effective marketing strategies. In fact, no marketing equals to no business.

What is marketing?

The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.

The marketing key roles function

Marketing plays a number of important roles in business. Market research, product development, promotion, and sales are to name but a few. Consumers need products and services to meet their daily needs. It implies that organisations need to understand the needs of customers. However, how will they do it? The answer is by ‘market research’. Market research is carried out by the marketing department in some organisations, while by a separate research and development department in some others.

Once organisations understand the needs of customers, the next issue is the development of new products and services. Marketing plays a very important role here. A new product development goes through a process of eight stages namely idea generation, idea screening, concept development and testing, marketing strategy, business analysis, product development, test marketing, and commercialisation. Almost all of these activities are usually carried out by the marketing department in organisations.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Just developing a new product itself is not enough. It must be promoted to take it to the customers. To do that, organisations once again will have to rely on marketing. There are a number of ways a new product or service can be promoted. Adverts on TV, Radio, newspapers, magazines, word of mouth, and the Internet are to name but a few. It should be mentioned that an organisation may not use all of the media mentioned above for the purpose of promotion due to a number of reasons e.g. budget limitations, type of customers, and frequency of adverts. It should also be mentioned that all these media of promotion have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Organisation of sales

Organisation of sales is also an important of area of marketing function. However, some organisations may have a separate sales department for sales activities. Dealing with the sales team and developing sales strategies are two broad functions in this area.  Organisations have different sales strategies depending on a number of factors e.g. increase and/or decrease in sales.

Important Issue

An important issue to acknowledge that marketing is not the only function in business. A business usually has a number of functions e.g. HRM, marketing, research and development, customer service, and IT. All these functions need to interact with each other for an effective operation of a business. Needless to say that marketing activities cannot be conducted in isolation from the rest of the business.

In a nutshell, marketing plays a number of important roles in business. It is perhaps the most important function in a business as it directly impacts on sales and profit. Organisations of all sizes engage in marketing activities. Actually, big organisations spend millions of pound on marketing.

Further Reading/References

Lancaster, G. & Reynolds, P. (2004) Marketing, 1st Edition, Palgrave Macmillan

Author: M Rahman

M Rahman writes extensively online and offline with an emphasis on business management, marketing, and tourism. He is a lecturer in Management and Marketing. He holds an MSc in Tourism & Hospitality from the University of Sunderland. Also, graduated from Leeds Metropolitan University with a BA in Business & Management Studies and completed a DTLLS (Diploma in Teaching in the Life-Long Learning Sector) from London South Bank University.