Week 1 - What is Marketing?

As per my understanding so far, Marketing in simple terms is a set of activities and strategies that organizations implement in order to make a product available that satisfies customer needs while making profit for the company.

In order to do so, the company needs to understand who the customers are, what are their needs, customer trends etc. by utilizing research and existing information from various sources. Customer today also expects the organizations to be transparent,  environment friendly, and have social responsibility. All this defines a perceived value of the organization and its product to a customer. To accomplish this desired value, organization needs to create a marketing plan and include set of organizational objectives and strategies.

Marketing Myopia reading was a great learning and eye opener for me. The reading poses a very interesting question for an organization. "What business we are really in?". The answer to this simple question can tell whether an organization is building a sustainable product that is oriented towards customer.

Video from Jeff Bezos is amazing. The video was short, concise,  and top-notch. I was amazed by the simplicity of the video in explaining powerful thoughts on how Amazon has created a huge market presence with high value customer oriented products and services using a short list of marketing principles. Below is the list.

1. Obsess over consumer - Pay attention to customer and work your way backwards to build quality product that are customer oriented. Relentless focus over customer helps realize errors while building a successful product/services for end users.
2. Invent - Invent on customer's behalf.  This is really important as many technology organizations organization forgets this and assumes technical superiority in itself will make the product more desirable.
3. Think long Term - Long term solution is necessary for an organization to create long lasting value. It will reap benefits for the customer right away but may take 5-7 yrs. for the company to realize benefits.
4. It's always day 1 - More inventions, more innovation and more ways to obsess over consumers. This provides the organization tendency to react and improve its products and services to remain competitive in the market and better serve the customers.