市场营销部分导读精选.docVIP

Introduction Related information: Marketing, as suggested by the American Marketing Association, is the process of planning and executing the pricing, promotion, and distribution of goods, ideas, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives. Marketing includes the activities of all those engaged in the transfer of goods from producer to consumer—advertising, promotions, product design, positioning, and product development. Marketing tools include elements such as focus groups, gap analysis, concept testing, product testing, perceptual maps, demographics, psychographics (lifestyles), and choice modeling. It is powerfully aided by market research, which embraces qualitative and quantitative methods. Sophisticated data collection and analysis include finding out what groups of potential customers (or markets) exist, what groups of customers you prefer to serve (target markets), what their needs are, what products or services you might develop to meet their needs, how the customers might prefer to use the products and services, what your competitors are doing, what pricing you should use and how you should distribute products and services to your target markets. Therefore, marketing is more than just selling and advertising, its essence is to understand your customers needs and develop a plan that surrounds those needs. In order to better satisfy the needs and wants of customers, many firms place consumers into groups, a process called market segmentation. In this process, potential customers are categorized based on different needs, characteristics, or behaviors. Once the potential market has been segmented, firms need to station their products relative to similar products of other producers, a process called product positioning. Once a positioning strategy has been determined, marketing managers seek to control the four basic elements of the marketing mix: product, price, place, and promotion, known as the four Ps of marketin