Marketing

Marketing and Sales

Are two common terms. Marketing is often used across the board for advertising and most people associate sales with employees of a company who drive from door to door and sell something. You can find out exactly what marketing and sales are all about and what's behind it on our website.

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Marketing and Sales Definition

A company is divided into different functional areas. 

Functional areas are nothing more than departments. Each department has its own goal and tries to achieve the best possible result. In addition, departments can and should work together to work more effectively and efficiently. Strengths can be bundled and weaknesses minimized.

This article discusses two functional areas of an organization.

The marketing function  and the sales function.

Marketing is a concept of placing goods and services on the market in a customer-oriented manner. The goal is to market the products and increase sales so that more sales can be generated. 

That's why marketing is also referred to as a sales economy.

Distribution refers to the planning and provision of a company's goods and services. 

The sales function also includes sales and deals with the requirements for the products to be available.

Simply explained, marketing and sales should satisfy the needs of customers (demanders).

You will learn how this is achieved in detail in the following sections.

Tasks of marketing and sales

For marketing, it is essential for a company to deal with the wishes of the customer.

This task is also called market-oriented corporate management .

There are various methods of market-oriented corporate management . 

One of them is market research. Here, the market is analyzed. The aim is to place the developed product or service on the market in the best possible way.

Market research is a part of marketing and is an authoritative tool. Market research refers to the collection, analysis and evaluation of data about a market. Based on the results obtained, economic decisions should be made.

Without information, the company cannot position itself successfully and does not even know the potential of the market. The procurement of information for the respective sales market is therefore particularly important. Only if the company knows the framework conditions can it act optimally and make sensible decisions.

In market research, two ways can be chosen to obtain information. The first way is for the company to carry out investigations independently or have investigations carried out by market research institutes. This way is called primary market research and is usually very accurate, but costly. 

The investigations are precisely tailored to the company, but very complex. The second way  is called secondary market research and  is to fall back on already existing studies and accept that they are not so accurate, but much more expensive (cheaper).

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Marketing

On the surface, there are two major goals. Defining an audience and positioning it in the market. 

In order to define the target group, the entire market is divided into sub-markets. 

This process is  called segmentation.

Segmentation refers to the division of the market into groups of buyers. These groups are called segments and they are used to identify the target audience for a company.

In detail, segmentation divides the entire market that offers heterogeneous (unequal) goods into submarkets that offer homogeneous (similar) goods. In this way, a company wants to recognize the characteristics of the buyers and take advantage of them.

The subdivision is based on various properties:

• Demographics - These include gender, marital status or age.

• Sociographic characteristics - This refers to educational level, income and housing conditions.

• Psychographic characteristics - These include attitudes and beliefs, lifestyle, personality and values.

• Geographical characteristics - This refers to an area such as the country, a region, the place of residence or the residential area.

Once the target group has been defined, the next step is to position yourself on the market. 

This works best with a special feature or a low price. If, for example, a customer thinks about a product or service with a certain characteristic, then, in the interest of the company, the customer should think exactly of his own company.

Marketing mix and the 4P's

How do companies go about achieving this goal? Various marketing instruments are  available for this purpose. What these are and what distinguishes them from each other, you will learn in the next section. 

This short overview should show you which four instruments there are in marketing:

• Product policy

• Price policy

• Distribution policy

• Communications policy

The marketing tools are also referred to as the 4P's. The four instruments begin in English with the letter P and stand for Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Each marketing policy instrument pursues its own task.

Product policy is about generating profitable sales. The goods and services should be designed in line with the market and customer-friendly. The complex instrument can be divided into a temporal and factual structure. From an economic point of view, every product goes through several phases. Product policy offers several more in-depth levels, which are only briefly touched on here. 

There is product innovation, product variation, product differentiation,  product diversification and product elimination.

Pricing policy deals with the task of setting the prices of goods and services. It is also often called a contract policy. To set prices, there is the so-called penetration, skimming and price differentiation. Rebates, financing options and delivery conditions are also part of the pricing policy.

Without the provision or availability of the products, customers will not be able to purchase goods and services. That's what the distribution policy is for.  Distribution describes the way in which goods and services are distributed. In other words, how the goods get from the seller to the buyer.

A company tries to build a bond with its customers and keep them. In the best case, emotions are  addressed and memories are awakened that are related to the products or services offered. 

It is precisely this task that is that of communication policy. It tries to promote sales by appealing to the senses and conveys a clear message.