Marketing as "social processes by which individuals and groups obtain what they needand want through creating, offering and freely exchanging products and services of value with others".
Functions of Marketing
(i) Gathering and Analysing market information:
(a) One of the important functions of a marketer is to gather and analyze market information.
(b) This helps to identify the needs of the customers and take various actions for the successful marketing of the products and services.
(c) It involves an analysis of the available opportunities and threats as well as strengths and weaknesses of the organisation.
(ii) Marketing planning:
(a) Another important area of work of a marketer is to develop appropriate marketing plans so that marketing objectives of the organisation can be achieved.
(b) For example a marketer of Mobile sets, having 10 percent of the current market share in the country aims at enhancing his market share to 20 percent in the next two years.
(c) He will have to develop a complete marketing plan covering various important aspects including the plan for increasing the level of production, promotion of the products, etc and specify the action programmes to achieve these objectives.
(iii) Product designing and development:
(a) The design of the product contributes to attractiveness of products.
(b) A good design can improve performance of a product and also give it a competitive advantage in the market.
(c) For example, when we plan to buy any product say a motorbike, we not only see its features like cost, mileage, etc. but also the design aspects like its shape, style, etc.
