marketing
The definition of the term ‘marketing’ in the Oxford Dictionary of English is:
‘the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.’
The process of marketing is concerned with identifying the needs of potential customers through market research, meeting these needs and maintaining a good relationship with the customer in order to retain their business. One effective method of building and maintaining a positive customer relationship is through the use of public relations.
Alongside commonly used forms of marketing such as direct mail, print advertising and television and radio marketing, online marketing has benefited from a great deal of growth in recent years. Popular methods of online marketing include pay per click advertising, banner advertising, organic search through search engine optimisation and e-mail marketing. As the internet and its influence continue to grow, many more marketing opportunities are becoming available and, as a result, the amount of money that is spent on internet marketing is also increasing considerably.
Since the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, the main focus of marketing has shifted from production, reducing the cost of manufacturing and distribution in order for products to be affordable, to selling. Marketing as we understand it today originated in the 1960s. Although the promotion of products and companies had been seen before, this period in history witnessed an increase in competition for customers in a market which was not increasing in size. It was necessary, therefore, to develop more effective methods of convincing customers to buy their products rather than those of their competitors.
The term ‘marketing’ is thought to have originated from an original form which simply referred to the process of buying and selling goods at a market for an agreed price. Since then, marketing has evolved to encompass many different areas of a product or company’s development and it is now often considered to be a science. Marketing and market research decides the approach to selling the product and even the maintenance of customer relationships in order to retain business. From traditional methods of advertising, technology and developments such as the internet have produced many new forms of marketing and the field continues to grow.