What is marketing?
I thought before I even begin to study and fill the gaps in my knowledge, there is one question that needs to be clarified. What exactly is marketing? For me, marketing was always something connected to advertising and promotion, but after some short research, I understood that advertising is only a part of marketing.
Marketing is essentially the process of connecting a product with the people who genuinely want it. There are many levels on which it operates: from the very beginning when you need to research and analyze the potential audience for your product, to figuring out the best price (not to lose money, but also not to scare the customers away), through the best placement of the product, all the way to advertising, promotion, and analyzing the results of everything mentioned above.
At the same time, there could be at least two angles from which you could look at it. Sometimes the goal of marketing is to research the market and give the producer data so that the producer can create a product that doesn't need any advertising because it fits the market so well it sells itself. The other angle is when the product is already made without any research. In this case, the goal of marketing is to do a different kind of research to find the audience that will most likely like the product and advertise it to them.
I understand now that marketing is much bigger than I thought, but there is still a lot of room to expand on this new understanding.
What about pros and cons of marketing?
Pros:
Marketing helps to build long-term relationships between the company and the consumer. It uses specific approaches, like offering post-purchase support so that the relationship doesn't end right after the money was transferred.
Marketing is responsible for providing information about optimal prices. When you know how much your potential clients are willing to pay for a certain service or product, you can set or adjust prices, which is beneficial for both the consumer and the company.
Even if you already have a product and customers, marketing can help to broaden your audience and put the product in front of new people. What is even more important is putting it in front of the people that would most likely love your product.
By analyzing your audience, marketing can help find the reason why people don't buy your products. There could be many of them, from simply not liking it to having better, similar options from your competitors.
There are millions of companies out there, but one of the key features of a successful company is to be unique, and marketing can definitely help to find your own place among the others.
Marketing creates competition that reduces monopoly risk and drives prices down, as well as stimulating quality growth.
Sometimes marketing can help clients to find things that they needed very quickly or bring solutions to problems that clients were not aware of.
Cons:
Marketing can be costly and time-consuming for a company.
Low-quality marketing can damage the reputation of even a well-established business.
When a company uses misleading tactics by advertising properties that their products do not possess, hiding information about their products that is not so attractive or sells products that are dangerous or harmful to the clients without them knowing about it, it leads to customer frustration.
Aggressive methods of pushing clients to purchase products immediately can cause regrets afterwards.
Some companies design products to wear out faster than they should — planned obsolescence — so the next purchase comes sooner.
Marketing can use psychology and manipulation to get clients to buy things they do not need or cannot afford.
It creates interruptions that waste your time.
You might also pay much more for the products to cover the company's expenses for the advertising.
The methods of collecting data from users (what they watch, like, or even talk about) may intrude too deeply into personal space.