Marketing is the art and science of identifying customer needs and wants, developing a product based on customer needs and wants and finally formulation of strategy for right product marketing mix. A thing important to note is marketing and sales are not the same. Marketing activities involves before the product development on the other hand sales only comes after product development for the purpose of selling the final product to the customers.
Marketers always aim to develop the products which solve the customer problems and also explore the new opportunity to offer something new in the market to surprise the customers. We have successful stories of 3M innovative, Apple computers, Amazon and eBay products or services. Today, customers admire these giants for their unique ideas.
Majority of products are failed in the earlier stages of product life cycle, it does not mean that the products are not able to qualify the needs and wants of the customers. There could be much rationale for the failure of products such as weak distribution, setting high expectation of customer in product advertisements, pricing strategy, segmentation and others. Marketers must construct the marketing plan with care to do justice with every factor of marketing.
Today Dell, Microsoft, HP, Amazon, Google, Southwest Airlines and Wal-Mart enjoying the journey of success not only because of products and services which they offer but also their tremendous and innovative way of marketing to reach the right audience. Marketing is not the single activity it is the set of activities to gather requirements regarding customers need and wants, communicate specification to the product team, developing right product and marketing plan.
