CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

1. Define what marketing is and discuss its core concepts.
2. Explain the relationships between customer value, satisfaction, and quality.
3. Define marketing management and understand how marketers manage demand and build profitable customer relationships.
4. Compare the five marketing management philosophies.
5. Analyze the major challenges facing marketers headings into the next century.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

Marketing is part of all of our lives and touches us in some way every day. To be successful each company that deals with customers on a daily basis must not only be customer-driven, but customer-obsessed. The best way to achieve this objective is to develop a sound marketing function within the organization. Marketing is defined as a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others. Marketing is a key factor in business success. The marketing function not only deals with the production and distribution of products and services, but it also is concerned with the ethical and social responsibility functions found in the domestic and global environment. Marketing and its core concepts, the exchange relationship, a brief description of marketing management, the five major philosophies of marketing thought and practice, marketing challenges in the new millennium, marketing’s relationship to the information technology boom and the Internet, and the new marketing landscape are the topics presented in this introductory chapter.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

1. Introduction a. Today’s successful companies at all levels have one thing in common. b. All successful companies are strongly customer focused and heavily committed to marketing. c. To be successful an organization motivates