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Preface This book is aimed to give an overview of what marketing really means in the contemporary business environment. It’s not a how to guide it’s more a background/reference document to help stimulate some thinking and discussion about marketing, which is an essential part of any higher education course covering Marketing. Let’s start with the premise that despite its importance, Marketing is the least well understood of all the business disciplines, both by those working within business and by the public at large. It is invisible to right-wing economists, whose credo is that prices carry all the information about supply and demand that markets, need to produce the goods and services that people want; the works of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, all leading economists in their field of their time have no mention of marketing whatsoever. The left-wing socialists, social scientists, journalists, and popular mass media programme makers do at least acknowledge marketing as being real. But their views often present marketing as little more than manipulative, exploitative, hard-sell advertising used by greedy and morally bankrupt corporations in pursuit of their next set of bonuses. Both views are at best incomplete in terms of truly understanding markets from the key perspective - that of the customers and suppliers who interact to make the markets. All commercial enterprises have products and services to sell and these are both the result of, and the reason for, marketing activities. Goods & Services, collectively called Products, are developed to meet customer needs and so those needs must be researched and understood. Each product can then be targeted at a specific market segment and a marketing mix developed to support its desired positioning. Product, Brand or Marketing Managers have to design marketing programmes for their products and develop good customer relationships to ensure their brands’ ongoing success
