Marketing

Marketing, refers to all activities concerned with the flow of goods and services from the producer to the consumer. It includes the various physical movements of the product including the pricing, wholesaling, transporting, and retailing of the product. It also involves packaging, design, and advertising. Marketing may be said to include everything that has to do with how a product is sold. In earlier times, when economic activities were simpler, people concentrated on the actual manufacture of the product. The business of taking it to a market and selling it was relatively simple. Today, with a huge range of products to choose from (often almost indistinguishable from each other) marketing is an important operation. Most companies employ a team of people, working under a marketing director, to plan the marketing of a product. They have to decide, on the basis of market surveys, just what the consumer wants. Then they design and package the product to match the requirements of the consumer. Marketing decisions involve a whole complex of considerations: what country and climate, for example, the product will be sold in; which social groupings among the population will buy it; how it will be distributed—through supermarkets, department stores, or mail order; and whether, and how, it should be advertised.

Marketing plays a vital role in ensuring prosperity since, it is argued, consumers are given what they want at a convenient location and packaged in the most efficient way possible. On the other hand, however, there is the objection that too much money is spent on marketing and that it is sometimes more concerned with persuading people that they need a certain product, rather than finding out what they want.