Promotional business items
Marketing leads to better utilization of idle resources. It leads to implementation of improved and new methods. It has several advantages to the community. Quality goods are available to consumers at reasonable prices. The standard of living of people will be increased. It creates employment opportunities. This indicates the importance of marketing.
The importance of marketing can be further high lighted from its various benefits listed below:
Marketing enlarges the market and enables the producers to increase production and earn more profits.
Marketing creates time, place and possession utilities for the goods and services. It is helpful to both producers and consumers.
Marketing efforts widen the area of market. Producers utilize their resources to the maximum. This optimum use of resources reduces the total cost per unit.
Marketing accelerates other activities such as banking, transporting, insurance, warehousing.
The net of effect of all marketing efforts is a rise in national income. There is a rise in per capital income.
With the provision of more items of necessities, comforts and luxuries the community enjoys a higher standard of living. Marketing is the creation and delivery of standard of living to society.
Marketing creates a climate for more production and services. It also results in more social over heads as more roads, more warehousing facilities more transport and communication. Thus more manpower is needed for the same and the avenues of employment increase.
Marketing stabilizes the economic conditions. It bridges the gap between producer and consumers. It is a connecting belt of the two wheels of the economy of a nation.
Functions of marketing
The precise list of marketing functions would include the following :
Buying and assembling: Buying function is concerned with the selection of goods to be sold or to be used in the process of manufacture. Assembling is different from buying. It begins after the goods have already been purchased. Assembling involves collection of goods purchased from different sources at one common place.
Standardizing and grading: Standardizing means establishment of a certain standard based in intrinsic physical properties or qualities of any commodity. Grading is a method of dividing products into certain groups in accordance with the standards determined in advance.
Storing: This involves the holding of goods from the time they are produced until they are needed for consumption is a human skill by which goods are protected from deterioration. Storage creates time and place utilities.
Transporting: Production and consumption are linked together by means of transport. Transport creates place utilities by making goods available at the place where they are required.
Financing The provision of funds is essential for meeting the marketing requirements.
Risk bearing: Risk is the chance of loss. It always involved where ownership is involved.
Securing market information: The success of a producer will depend upon the knowledge of the demands for the product in the market.
Packing and packaging: Packing means the wrapping, crating, filling, compressing of goods to protect them from spoilage, breakage, leakage. Packaging requires certain good qualities like attractiveness, protective strength, consumer?s convenience, economy.
Branding: Branding implies a guarantee of satisfaction and standard quality. It simplifies purchase and sale and secures repeated sales to the producers. It induces product royalty and helps in widening the market.
II. Advertising
Advertising, collective term for public announcements designed to promote the sale of specific commodities or services. Advertising is a form of mass selling, employed when the use of direct, person-to-person selling is impractical, impossible, or simply inefficient. It is to be distinguished from other activities intended to persuade the public, such as propaganda, publicity, and public relations. Advertising techniques range in complexity from the publishing of simple, straightforward notices in the classified advertisement columns of newspapers to the concerted use of newspapers, magazines, television, radio, direct mail, and other communications media in the course of a single advertising campaign.
III. Merchandising
Merchandising refers to the planning and control of goods or services to provide effective product development and to ensure the proper commodity at a place, time, price, and quantity conducive to profitable sale. For the manufacturer, merchandising involves product planning and management. For the retailer or wholesaler it includes selecting the goods preferred by the customers or trade. Correct placement and timing of a product are particularly important for fashion goods, for seasonal merchandise, and for fads with a rate of sale that fluctuates drastically. The price is usually determined so as to sell merchandise promptly and at a profit satisfactory to the merchandiser. The quantity ordered should create a supply large enough to satisfy all potential customers but should not be excessive to a degree that might necessitate price reductions in order to bring about sufficient sales.
IV. Sales promotion
Sales Promotion is an element of the marketing process that can close the sale of goods or services to a potential customer by providing the incentive to buy. Sales promotion, advertising, and salesmanship are the major techniques used in merchandising products to the public. Salesmanship often takes the form of a face-to-face encounter between the buyer and seller ; the presentation is set up to convince customers that the product on sale is essential to their satisfaction. The lack of personal feedback between buyer and seller is sometimes considered a drawback of the advertising approach. Selling by telephone, although it is significantly less effective than personal selling, is still considered an important method of merchandising. Since the 1980s, a growing promotional technique has been to use in-home shopping programmes on cable television channels and computer networks.
Promotional practices:
The techniques of sales promotion are used both to motivate salespeople to improve their performance and to induce consumers to purchase goods and services. Although sales promotion works most closely with advertising, it is also related to other elements of marketing: production services, packaging, price, and distribution. At the manufacturing and wholesale levels of distribution, the methods used to motivate personnel to meet specific goals usually fall into two categories sales incentive prizes and sales contests. Both are based upon the salesperson reaching an objective above the normal sales quota.
Consumer promotions encompass a wide variety of techniques, including sampling of goods or services, store redeemable money-off coupons to encourage the trial of products, special price-reduced packages, mail-in premium merchandise offers, cash or coupon refunds by mail, special product packaging, contests, and sweepstakes. During recessions, when the demand for customers\' money becomes more competitive, there is greater participation in refund, coupon, and premium offers.
Sales promotion, now fully recognized as a vital element in the marketing mix, has become a vast industry. In recent years, sales promotion expenditures have exceeded monies spent on advertising and there are strong indications that this pattern of growth will continue to maintain its economic edge.
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