P1
Marketing is perhaps the most important activity in a business because it has a direct effect on profitability and sales. Larger businesses will dedicate specific staff and departments for the purpose of marketing. It is important to realise that marketing cannot be carried out in isolation from the rest of the business. For example, the marketing section of a business needs to work closely with operations, research and development, finance and human resources to check their plans are possible. Operations will need to use sales forecasts produced by the marketing department to plan their production schedules. Sales forecasts will also be an important part of the budgets produced by the finance department, as well as the deployment of labour for the human resources department and then finally a research and development department will need to work very closely with the marketing department to understand the needs of the customers and to test outputs of the R&D section.
The basic concept of marketing is that it enabled the company to identify the needs of their customers and produce products and services to satisfy those needs. By doing this, the customer is the most focus of the business when decision making is in process. A business that does this is marketing-orientated.
The production concept is where a business mainly focuses on creating economies of scale in production and distribution of a product or service. This assumes that customers will purchase lower-priced items, so demand is driven by availability. Examples of this is practice can be found in shops such as Primark, where the shop will purchase cheaper clothing materials to increase their profit margins.
The sales concept is known as ‘the hard sell’, this is where a product or service is produced and then in which personal selling and harsh selling techniques are used to convince customers to