5 Steps of Marketing Process

What is Marketing?

Marketing as a discipline includes all the activities a business does to attract clients and sustain relationships with them. Every step taken to get a commodity or service from the business to the consumer is considered a part of marketing. Reaching those customers involves determining the needs of the market, creating goods or services to fill those needs, figuring out who is most likely to buy them, marketing those goods or services, and distributing them through the best channels. Simply said, marketing is about knowing what your clients are seeking and utilising that knowledge to grow the firm.

Dr. Philip Kotler defines marketing as “The science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. It pinpoints which segments the company is capable of serving best and it designs and promotes the appropriate products and services.”

Marketing refers to the set of activities associated with recognizing and predicting consumer requirements, followed by an effort to profitably address these needs. The most important part of every business is marketing, which includes tasks like creating product descriptions, building website pages, enhancing customer service, identifying market and business sectors, and carrying out market research. Marketing involves techniques that support a company’s expansion.

Steps of Marketing Process

The marketing process involves five steps. The first four steps involve a company understanding the consumers, designing a marketing strategy, creating customer value, and building strong customer relationships. And the final step of the marketing process includes a company reaping the rewards for creating superior customer value.

Step 1: Understand the marketplace and consumer needs and wants:

Businesses must be well aware of the composition of their market before it begins the marketing process. This calls for providing fundamental information about the target market, including information on their demographics, sources of income, purchasing power, and projected spending (especially on goods or services). Making different brands and engaging in competition in both markets is another strategy. Understanding clients’ needs, wants, and demands are critical for developing market strategies that satisfy the needs of customers and for developing value relationships with customers. This improves the firm’s long-term customer equity. Understanding consumer needs and wants is at the heart of this process. It is important to differentiate between needs, wants, and demands.

• Needs (States of felt deprivation): These include physical needs for food, clothing, shelter, warmth, and safety, as well as knowledge and self-expression. Marketers cannot generate these needs because they are a fundamental component of human existence.
• Wants (Shaped by culture and individual personality): Wants are nothing but an evolved form of needs; however. they are shaped by society or culture.
• Demands (Backed by buying power): Demand is an index of people’s strong purchasing power. When an enterprise addresses the demands of its clients, it brings them happiness which is more than just satisfaction.

Some critical considerations for every marketer at this stage are as follows:

• Knowing the local market/area/country/region.
• Identifying the preferences of the target audience
• Determining how much consumers are willing to spend on what you sell; particularly, their purchasing power.

Just recognising the needs is insufficient. Marketers need to understand whether or not they will be able to offer an “affordable” product for their clients.

For example: Although VW Beetle and Jetta may come to mind first when one thinks of Volkswagen, the company’s brand portfolio goes beyond just VW vehicles and SUVs. Additionally, it is the parent corporation for several luxury brands, including Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini, Porsche, and others, whose vehicles sell for substantially higher prices than VW’s sedans.

Step 2: Design a customer-driven marketing strategy:

A marketing strategy refers to the company’s overall “game plan” for using its scarce resources to contact prospective consumers and convert them into long-term customers. A product usually involves two kinds of marketing strategy, build it and they will come strategy and customer-driven strategy. Under the latter strategy, businesses first analyse potential customers and then provide customers with what they want or need. In a nutshell, it’s about developing a bond and building a relationship. For the second step, a business has to follow the below sub-steps:

i) Identify which clients to serve; i.e., establish the target market: It is just impossible to meet the needs of the complete target audience. Therefore, a marketer has to divide the market into separate segments before deciding what segments to target. Certainly, if the marketer has complete resources like cash, staff, and other resources, they can choose numerous market niches. Understanding the target audience can help the business better understand its requirements and desires as well as how to best satisfy them.

ii) Determining the best approach to service clients; i.e., choosing a value proposition: It involves developing an appealing value proposition for those customers—a promise of value that conveys the advantages of the company’s goods or services.  Also getting to know the target market better than the rivals do. This is the point at which marketers can distinguish their brand in the market. The five key concepts for this are as follows:

• Production Concept: Under this concept, a business focuses on reducing the production cost of the products by producing goods in bulk and distributing it to customers. It is for the consumers who will prefer things that are readily available and reasonably priced. 
• Product Concept: Under this concept, organisations manufacture products of superior quality. It is for consumers who will prefer products with excellent quality, performance, and new features. 
• Selling Concept: Some organisations believe that they can sell more products by convincing them through aggressive selling and other promotional efforts. By using the selling concept, an organisation can make a consumer purchase a product that they have no interest in buying.
• Marketing Concept:  Through marketing concept organisations try to satisfy the needs of the customers better than their competitors. Hence, this concept states that ‘customer satisfaction’ is the pre-condition of the organisation’s objectives and goals. 
• Societal Concept: Even though the marketing concept satisfies the needs and wants of customers in the best possible way, it faces criticism from people concerned about the environment and society. These people believe that companies should not blindly follow their goals of customer satisfaction and should also look for social and environmental factors. Thus, the societal concept includes keeping in mind the social responsibility of a company while performing its marketing activities.

Step 3: Construct an integrated marketing program that delivers superior value:

Customers currently have a wide range of purchasing options. Given that, how can a business draw in and, even more crucially, keep its customers? The solution is rather straightforward: corporations make sure customers get their money’s worth. Customer value is, by definition, the proportion between a customer’s perceived advantages and the expenditures associated with purchasing your goods or services. It is the overall process of building and maintaining profitable customer relationships by delivering superior value and satisfaction. It deals with all aspects of acquiring, keeping, and growing customers. Assuming the company has exhausted secondary research, it’s time to turn its attention to primary research, assuming that’s part of the research strategy. Primary research is asking questions and then listening to and/or witnessing the behavior of the target audience the company is studying. Employing suitable scientific methodologies for primary research data collecting and processing is critical to get dependable, accurate results. This entails choosing the appropriate individuals and quantity of people to speak with, creating well-phrased surveys or interview scripts, and effectively recording data.

How does a brand generate value? Several synergies enable this to occur, and these are as follows:

• The brand ensures repeat purchases (retention) and client loyalty by cultivating brand preference among target customers and long-term customer relationships. This is referred to as consumer equity.
• Because of increased market share, the brand can capture value by providing value for consumers and encouraging retention.
• Increased share of the market and customer loyalty result in increased revenue and profit, which contributes to the financial success of the organisation.

Step 4: Build profitable relationships and create customer delight:

The “secret sauce” of any firm, in the end, is a successful client relationship. In this stage of the marketing process, marketers build, maintain, and expand their relationships with customers. One of the most challenging—and expensive—aspects of marketing is getting customers. However, a company can more effectively decide how to approach them and so make the most of the marketing budget if it lacks in determining who are the potential clients. Customers are more inclined to make repeat purchases from a business when they are satisfied with the firm, its goods, or its services. Customers who are happy with the company’s products are also more likely to want to purchase more from them in the future, and they are also more inclined to tell others about its products, which lowers the cost of acquiring new customers for the business.

Therefore, a company must continue to strive for new clients. While doing so, it is also essential to keep existing customers for the long term. In other words, building customer equity ought to be the primary goal of any marketing mix. The question is, how do you establish this profitable relationship? That’s where customer relationship management kicks in. Customer relationship management focuses on:

• Giving customers something worthwhile
• Assisting customers at the pre-purchase stage.
• Making after-sales services available.
• Seeking regular client input.
• Encouraging customers to make suggestions and provide input regarding the product.

Step 5: Capture Value from customers to create profits and customer equity:

Successful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) aims to increase customer equity or the potential revenues that a business could make from its existing and future clients. Increasing client loyalty leads to higher customer equity. Marketers want to increase client equity because it serves as a leading indicator of financial success. Simply said, the greater a company’s customer equity, the more profit it makes and the higher its market value will be.