Marketing... Indispensable yet dangerous.

Avery old, shortest yet the most apt definition of marketing is the art of “Meeting needs profitably”. But my question today is marketing only about meeting needs? Is profit the only motive to drive marketing? And of course do all the marketing strategies actually meet our needs?

Times have changed, marketing has become an important concern for all companies, and as a result we can clearly observe that marketing has grown beyond just meeting needs to creating new ones. Were we Indians that unbearably stinky some 12 years ago when the deodorant and perfume market was just 3% of its current worth? From a luxury item suddenly perfumes and deodorants started to be projected to people as a necessity and thus a need of the same was created, to an extent that people who did not use them suddenly started feeling less confident about themselves.

Marketing has been in our culture since inception, consider the various dressing styles and dance forms in our country, they were our methods to advertise our culture/state. And that in turn attracted people from other states/countries to come over and thereby increase trade. How do you think Portuguese came over to south India to trade for spices if there was no marketing for the same?

Marketing as a broader concept aims at increasing sales, and if the process demands creating a need/hype for a product, then that’s how it’s done. However sales alone cannot be a driving factors for marketing, brand building is another very important aspect that a marketer needs to take care of. Some famous researches show that it takes almost 5 times as much to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. Customer loyalty has got a lot to do with the product quality and pricing too, thus marketing cannot really operate in sedition to the operations/manufacturing cycle, in fact there has been a consistent focus in this direction too and the term “complete marketing campaign” has become commonplace. Marketing campaigns ensure production to delivery to exist in a chain closely linked to each other and not as independent activities.

Many eminent personalities have already sung praises for marketing and it’s not completely incorrect to say that it is perhaps the most important activity that drives sales. In such uncertain times such as ours when the buying habits have become almost impossible to predict, the ethics in marketing are an equally important concern and should not be neglected. If it comes to a particular brand of perfume or deodorant, and one claims to better than other, it may not have long term adverse effects, but imagine if such ideas are applied to life saving drugs or other medicines? A very simple example of the same is the growing culture of having carbonated drinks, or eating fast food, marketers have managed to show it as “cool” and “hep” and perhaps if you are a part of our countries youth you should better be drinking more and more of a particular brand of carbonated drinks.

Having said all this, obviously we cannot really judge the right and wrong in marketing. It’s an indispensable concept and perhaps shall always be on the top priority till we have needs,(both real ones and ones created by the marketers), I would only suggest that all marketing campaigns are backed by strong ethics keeping the larger good in mind.