Marketing is the process of creating consumer value in the form of goods, services, or ideas that can improve the consumer’s life.
Marketing board is an organization created by many producers to try to market their product and increase consumption and thus prices. It can also be defined as an organization set up by a government to regulate the buying and selling of a certain commodity within a specified area. They most commonly exist to help sell farm products such as milk, eggs, beef or maize and are funded by the farmers or processors of those crops or products. Marketing boards often also receive funding from governments as an agricultural subsidy. The leadership and strategies of the marketing boards are set through votes by the farmers.
Marketing boards also sometimes act as a pool, controlling the price of farm products by forming a legal cartel. They also fund other ventures beneficial to their members such as research.
Marketing boards are state-controlled or state-sanctioned entities legally granted control over the purchase or sale of agricultural commodities. Since the mid-1980s they have declined in number under pressure from domestic liberalization and from international trade rules that increasingly cover agriculture. Where reforms have been widespread and successful, marketing boards have vanished or retreated to providing public goods, such as strategic grain reserves or insurance against extraordinary price fluctuations i.e. the National cereals board, the Tea board of Kenya. Where reforms have been less successful, the weaknesses of private agricultural marketing channels have been revealed by the rollback of marketing boards, often leading to calls for reinstatement of powerful marketing boards. It is often suggested that an exporting country should set up a price stabilization fund to insulate farmers from fluctuations in the world market