According to Marketing Guru Prof. Philip Kotler, marketers market the below 10 entities-

1. Goods —
Good is something tangible that can be offered to market to satisfy a need or want. Physical goods constitute the bulk of most countries production and marketing effort. FMCG products, Newspapers, electronic devices are examples of goods.

2. Services —
A service is an offering that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything. For example, hotel services, airlines, banks, insurance companies, transportation corporations etc. Professional services like lawyers, doctors, teachers etc.

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A target market is selected by breaking down a total market into sub-markets. Since an organisations doesn’t has the resources or skills to meet all the demands of the people, it decides on certain preferences of the market that it can fulfil. Not everyone in the market likes the same movie, same sauce, same bathing soap, etc. If it tries to serve all the preferences it will never be able to satisfy all the demands or needs in the market. It will become a mammoth task to direct marketing strategies and getting a product created for everybody. Therefore the marketers divide the markets according to preferences.
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Marketing Concept is the base for Marketing Management. It simplifies conducting business, streamlines the steps involved in decision making process to highlight the hurdles, and helps in taking necessary steps to overcome them.

It is a customer centric philosophy that an organisation adopts to serve customers and achieve organisational goals.

Over a period of time based on the technological developments marketing philosophy has gone through major changes. These have been divided into Traditional Marketing Concepts and Modern Marketing Concepts.
The Traditional Marketing concepts- The focus is mainly on achieving sales objectives. There are three types –

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The term Marketing holds different meaning for different people. For some it is shopping. When asked, where have you been? You may get a reply – I went for marketing. For some it is an art of selling, promotion, advertising, etc. To be precise Marketing involves all the above activities apart from many that we will go through in the following pages. The Knowledge Exchange Business Encyclopaedia defines marketing as “planning and executing the strategy involved in moving a good or service from producer to consumer.” To be precise, the concept of marketing has evolved over a period of time and many thinkers have given us definitions depending on its functions during that period.

What is Marketing?
Marketing is an art of getting products and services created, priced, communicated, and delivered to potential consumers by meeting the objectives of the organisation. It is not necessary that the objective of the organisation is to make profit. The organisation can carry out the marketing activities for public welfare as well.

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The main objective of marketing is to see that raw materials move from suppliers to manufacturers from where final end products of consumers’ need/choice are moved to end consumers.

Marketing functions start with understanding buyers needs and ends with fulfilling these needs by seeing that commodities of customers choice move from production facility to the final target market. The functions of marketing include buying, selling, transporting, storing, standardizing and grading, financing, risk taking and market information. Apart from the above activities, marketing in the 21^st century includes market research, planning, assisting in product development, and laying out different strategies for target markets. Functions of Marketing can be divided into following categories-

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Like any other function, Marketing too has its limitations and disadvantages. They are listed below-

1. Marketing creates needs.Marketing involves creating of needs and demands by creating products and services that the consumer wants or may need in the future. Thus it creates a society where a customer is sometimes compelled to buy something which he doesn’t needs. For example – a customer may go for an expensive model of a car where his needs are met by a basic model. Marketers also provide options of EMI’s through which customers are tempted to buy a product which affects its economic condition on a long run. Introduction of credit cards by the banking sector has put many customers under debt and many times the banks have to do settlements with their customers as they are not able to pay the bank

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Marketing benefits three different parties involved in the marketing process-
1. Manufacturer
2. Buyer
3. Society

Benefits accruing to the Manufacturer –

a. Marketing brings efficiency in the organisations structure. With clearly defined task responsibilities and integrated marketing management structure, the overlapping of activities and confusions is taken care of. For any information or data requirement the management can reach out to that particular department. It becomes easy to bring changes in any marketing strategy because of clear differentiation of tasks.

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Manufacturers offer goods and services of consumers’ desire by making them conveniently available and communicated by meeting the objectives of the company. Marketing is seen as a function of the entire enterprise. In order to study the scope of Marketing we need to study its components. A simple marketing system comprises of the following Marketing components –

Suppliers, Market offering, Market, Intermediaries, Marketing Environment.

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Manufacturers want to earn profits by fulfilling needs of buyers. In recent times, there has been a shift towards meeting societal needs as well. So we can broadly say that Marketing has three main objectives in the 21st century-

1. Meeting the objectives of the Organisation-
• To ensure that the right kind of offering is made to the byer at a profit to the company.
• To ensure the offering made is efficiently made available at the right time at the right price
• To ensure effective and efficient after sales service is provided to maintain and increase market share.
• To provide direction for future course.

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We can see from the definitions that marketing has evolved over a period of time. The end consumer has been given emphasis in the later stages. We can put the evolution of Marketing into four stages-

1. Barter system –When priorities of mankind increased, people had a need to obtain different products which they were not able to grow or make. They started exchanging goods/products via barter system. These transactions were held at different places. As most of the people led a nomadic life there was no dedicated place for exchange. This system was even successful in doing transactions with people from faraway places. Recently a research study revealed that Mayan civilization traded wheat for their vegetable produce with north-American residents.

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