Common people said that, marketing is everything you do on a daily basis to sell a product or provide a service to a customer. It encompasses every way in which a customer perceives business and everything that generates interest from a customer and encourage customer to actually pay for the product and service.

Marketing‘s key components is creating value for the customer. What’s that mean? It is a philosophy that dedicates resources of the firm to ensuring that the wants, needs, and demands of the customer are the firm’s focus. Marketing is a process of creating value for the customer. Process means a set of activities to educate, communicate with, and motivate the targeted consumer about the firm’s services or company’s product and services.

In above process, plan is needed. An effective marketing plan is an ongoing value creating process composed of following elements: marketing segmentation, marketing strategy, market research, pricing, placement, value chain.

Marketing segmentation

Segmentation is the first step in developing overall marketing process or strategy. How do we know those segmentation? The answer is by performing market segmentation analysis.

By applying this, marketers can make better use of their marketing budgets and more efficiently manage their overall marketing strategy.

Market research

Research is a must to make better decisions. What things are researched? It researches  the way a firm with a marketing philosophy determines what those wants and needs may be, and further,how to communicate the associated benefits most effectively and efficiently. Additionally, market research is used to monitor and modify, if needed, the elements of the marketing strategy.

Market research includes:

·         Defining the problem and research objectives

·         Developing a research plan

·         Presenting the plan

·         Implementing the plan (collecting and analyzing data)

·         Interpreting and reporting the findings

This is the area of marketing where we begin to see science as well as art.

Pricing

To sell a product for a particular price, value must be created. What is value? Value is the consumer’s estimate of the product’s overall capacity to satisfy his/her needs. Consumers are savvy and will choose

based on the level of satisfaction that corresponds with the price.

New, innovative products often use this pricing strategy because their newness and uniqueness may enable a higher price at first. As copycats and competitors enter the market, prices will fall to meet the market price.

Some marketers, though, may use a penetration strategy, where the product or service is offered at a very low price, in order to quickly grab market share and be considered the low price provider.