This document discusses key concepts in marketing including identifying customer needs, satisfying those needs to build loyalty, and maintaining relationships. It notes that marketing involves more than just production and sales, and that businesses must adapt to changing customer needs and market conditions. Marketing aims to convert wants to needs using promotion, build relationships through customer data, and keep customers loyal by targeting their specific needs. The business environment and customer spending patterns are constantly in flux requiring businesses to be responsive.

1. Marketing,
competition and
the customer

2. • Marketing is much more than just advertising and selling
the goods and services of a business.
• Think about something that you’ve bought recently.
• What persuaded you to buy it?
• An advert? A salesperson? Perhaps a friend?

3. The role marketing
• Business activity involves more than just coming up with
an idea for a product or service, making it and then
selling it!
• This may include identifying or even predicting what they
require.
• Then the business has to produce exactly what
customers want.

4. • Finally managers need to make sure that they have
satisfied customer requirements.

5. Identifying and satisfying
customer needs
• The main role of marketing is to convert the wants of an
individual into a need.
• Businesses often use promotional activities, especially
advertising, to persuade consumers that something they
want is a need.
• Business sales, revenue and profits will rise.

6. Maintaining customer
loyalty
• Customer base: The group of customers a business
sells its products to.
• Build customer relationships to maintain the loyalty of its
customers to the business and its products.

7. Building customer
relationships
• The marketing function must then aim to keep these
customers.
• This requires collecting as much information as possible
about each individual customer.
• E.g. income, lifestyle and buying habits.
• Better identify and satisfy customers’ needs and carefully
target individual customers with information about the
firm’s products.

8. Market changes
• Market: All customers and consumers who are
interested in buying a product and have the financial
resources to do so.
• A market is a place where buyers and sellers come
together to buy and sell goods and services.

9. Definitions
• Target market: Individuals or organisations identified by
a business as the customers or consumers of their
products.
• Customer: An individual or business that buys goods
and services from a business.
• Consumer: the final user of a product.
• Consumer markets: markets for goods and services
bought by the final consumer.

10. Definitions
• Industrial markets: markets for goods and services
bought by other businesses to use in their production
process.
• Business environment: The combination of internal
and external factors that influence the operations of a
business.

11. Why consumer spending
patterns change
• The business environment is constantly changing.
• The price of the product
• The price of competitors’ products
• Changes in consumer income
• Changes in population size and structure.

12. • Changes in tastes and fashion.
• Spending on advertising and other promotional activities.
• Activity 10.1
• Activity 10.2

13. Changing customer needs
• If a business is to survive in the long run, it has to
respond to any change in customer needs.
• It is easy to see how and why a business that produces
and sells fashion items, such as clothing.
• Activity 10.3