NCERT Class 12 Business Studies Marketing

MARKETING

WHAT IS A MARKET

In the traditional sense, the term ‘market’ refers to the place where buyers and sellers gather to enter into transactions involving the exchange of goods and services. It is in this sense that this term is being used in day to day language, even today. The other ways in which this term is being used is in the context of a product market (cotton market, gold or share market), geographic market (national and international market), type of buyers(consumer market and industrial market) and the quantity of goods transacted (retail market and wholesale market).

But in modern marketing sense, the term market has a broader meaning. It refers to a set of actual and potential buyers of a product or service. For example, when a fashion designer designs a new dress and offers it for exchange, all the people who are willingto buy and offer some value for it can be stated to be the market for that dress. Similarly, market for fans orbicycles or electric bulbs or shampoos refers to all the actual and potential buyers for these products.

WHAT IS MARKETING

The term marketing has been described by different people in different ways. Some people believe that marketing is same thing as ‘shopping’. Whenever they go out for shopping of certain products or services, they describe it as marketing. There are some other people who confuse marketing with ‘selling’ and feel that marketing activitystarts after a product or service has been produced. Some people describeit to mean ‘merchandising’ or designing a product. All these descriptions may be partly correct but marketing is a much broader concept, which is discussed as follows:

Traditionally marketing has been described in terms of its functions or activities. In this respect, marketing has been referred to as performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from producers to consumers. We know that mostly manufacturing firms do not produce goods for their own consumption but for the consumption or use by others. Therefore, to move the goods and  services from producers to consumers,number of activities such as product designing or merchandising, packaging, warehousing, transportation, branding, selling, advertising and pricing are required.

All these activities are referred to as marketing activities. Thus, ‘merchandising’, ‘selling’ and ‘shopping’ are all part of a large number of activities undertaken by a firm, which are collectively called marketing. It may be noted here that marketing is not merely a post-production activity. It includes many activities that are performed even before goods are actually produced and continue even after the goods have been sold. For example, activities such as identification of customer needs, collection of information for developing   the product, designing suitable product package and giving it a brand name are performed before commencement of the actual production. Similarly, many follow up activities are required for maintaining good customer relations for procuring repeat sale. In modern times, emphasis isplaced on describing marketing as a social process.

It is a process whereby people exchange goods and services for money or for something of value to them. Taking the social perspective, Phillip Kolter has defined marketing as,  “a social process by which individualgroups obtain what they need and wantthrough creating offerings and freely exchanging products and services of value with others”. Thus, marketing is a social process where in people interact with others, in order to persuade them.

Question

1. Identify the four market segments that Nokia plans to address as per the news report above.

2. What is the basis of classification of the market used by the company?

3. What do you mean by realignment of product portfolio? Illustrate this from the case above.

4. Identify the points that can be highlighted in marketing campaigns for each segment.

5. What are the different considerations in the mind of consumers of each segment while purchasing mobile phones as given in the above case?

Please refer to attached file for NCERT Class 12 Business Studies Marketing