The Concept Of Marketing Those Entrepreneurs Must Understand

Why should the entrepreneurs understand about marketing?  I am sure many of them don’t know about marketing.

What is the marketing? Marketing is managing the profitable customer relationship. The aim of marketing is creating value for customer and capture value from customer in return. The definition that I quote from Philips Kotler’s book with the title Principle of Marketing (2012)

Very simple, but need the big effort to achieve it, a big mistake the entrepreneurs only focus selling their product but it's not enough to make your company sustainable. I thought only knowing your customer, connected with them, and maintain their satisfaction, and engaged their loyalty. All task for the entrepreneur whom marketing oriented.

The marketing process has five steps must do the entrepreneur. They are from understanding customer needs to design customer-driven marketing strategies and integrated marketing program, to building customer relationship and capturing values for the firms.

The entrepreneurs must understand that the costumer didn’t buy product or service if the needed and wanted. So know deeply what customer need and wants it’s important to the entrepreneur. Needs as known as states of felt deprivation. They include basic physical needs for food, clothing, warmth, and safety, social needs like belonging and affection, and individual need for knowledge and self-expression. Marketer did not create the needs, they are the basic need for the human makeup.

Wants are the form human needs take as they are affected by culture and individual personality or values. Like Indonesian need food but they prefer like Nasi Goreng than Big Mac.

What the next? After the entrepreneur knows deeply customer need and wants, the next steps is to decide which customers it will service and how will bring them value. It called a customer driven marketing strategy. There are two questions we must answer. They are what customer will we serve or what is our target market and How can we serves these customer best or what is our a value proposition.

Some entrepreneurs think that marketing as finding as many customers as possible and increasing demand. But it is wrong. We have limited resource and capability. We must focus only a few segments we can serve well. Remember if we trying to serve all customers, maybe we didn’t serve anyone well. Example BMW only serves the up segment for the luxury car. They don’t care about mass and lower car like Toyota. So its make BMW has strong value proportion as the luxury car and BMW promise as the ultimate driving machine.  

The entrepreneurs must develop an integrated marketing program that we call marketing mix. The concepts of the marketing mix are the four P (4P) of marketing product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Let talks one by one. The product is all items that we offer for the costumer according to the need and wants, make customer satisfying for the value proposition we offer.  It much decides how much will charge for the offering (price) and how it will make the offering available to the target consumer (Place). Finally, it must communicate with the target customer about the offering and persuade them of its merits (Promotion).

Without the customer you don’t have a business, It true. So the entrepreneur must be care and maintain the customer. The overall process of building and maintaining profitable customer relationship by delivering superior customer value and satisfaction we call the concept of customer relationship management.

Marketing is about creating relationships. So, Are you have good relations with your customer?

Andi Nur Bau Massepe

Lecture from Faculty Economic and Business Hasanuddin University