After considering the definition of marketing, we can understand some of the obvious reasons why the study of marketing is relevant. Here are the reasons why I should study marketing.
The marketing field offers a variety of interesting and challenging career opportunities, such as personal selling, advertising, packaging, transport, storage, marketing research, product development, wholesaling, and retailing.
Also, many individuals who work for non-business organizations engage in marketing activities. Marketing skills are used to promote political, cultural, church, civic, and charitable activities.
Whether a person earns a living through marketing activities or performs them without compensation in non-business settings, marketing knowledge and skills are valuable assets.
A business organization must sell products to survive and grow. Directly or indirectly, marketing activities help sell organizations’ products.
By doing so, they generate financial resources that can be used to develop innovative products. New products allow a firm to satisfy better customers’ changing needs, which in turn enables the firm to generate more profits.
Our highly complex economy depends heavily on marketing activities. They help produce the profits that are essential not only to the survival of individual businesses but also to the health and ultimate survival of the economy as a whole.
Profits are essential to economic growth because, without them, businesses find it difficult, if not impossible, to buy more raw materials, hire more employees, attract more capital, and create additional products that, in turn, make more profits.
Approaches To The Study of Marketing
An approach to the study of marketing is simply a particular perspective of marketing chosen because it best highlights the aspects desired for investigation. In common parlance, marketing is selling something at a shop or marketplace.
To some, it has meant the study of individual commodities and their movement in the more place; to some, it has meant the study of institutions and personas who move these products or the study of the economic contribution, whereas to product movements and the way of personas involved move them.
Thus the study of marketing has, thus, been approached in more than one way.
However, these different approaches have immensely contributed to the modem approach’s evolution and the marketing concept.
These approaches may be broadly classified as commodity, institutional, and managerial to facilitate the study. Besides these well-recognized and established approaches, of late,
the recently developed societal and systems approaches have been attracting considerable attention.
Commodity Approach
In the commodity approach to the study of marketing, the focus of the study is a specific commodity, say, wheat, rice, approach, the subject matter of discussion around the specific commodity selected for the study, the nature and extent of demand, the distribution channels used and the function, such as buying, selling, financing, advertising, storage repeating such studies in case of different commodities one gets a complete picture of the entire field of marketing.
Functional Approach
In the functional approach, the market study focuses on the different functions recognized for repetitive thief occurrences and necessarily performed to consummate the market transaction.
Though there is no unanimity about the number and nature of the function that constitutes marketing, nevertheless, some functions often recognized are selling, storage, transportation, and functions.
In this approach, the meeting is regarded as the “business of buying and selling and as including those activities involved in the flow of goods and serves between producer and consumer.”
These functions are also studied about given commodities and marketing institutions in terms of their nature, importance, operational methods, costs, and problems;
Management Approach
In the managerial approach, the marketing study focuses on the decision-making process involved in the performance of marketing functions at a firm’s level.
The study encompasses a discussion of the different underlying concepts, decision-influencing factors, alternative strategies, their relative importance, strengths and weaknesses, techniques, and problem-solving methods.
Institutional Approach
In the institutional approach to the study of marketing, the focus is on the study of the \arious middlemen and facilitating agencies.
The study includes their position in the distribution canes, the purpose of their intensity, the function performed and services rendered by them, and their operating methods. The cost involved and the problems faced by them.” The study is related to each type of institution to obtain a comprehensive view of marketing.
Societal Approach
In the societal approach to the study of marketing, the entire marketing process is regarded not as a means by which business meets the needs of consumers but as a means by which society meets its own consumption needs.
The focus of the study, therefore, is the interactions between the various environmental factors (sociological, cultural, political, and legal) and marketing decisions and their impact on the well-being of society.
As such, in this approach, there is a significant element of normative and substantial reliance on the value judgment based o an accepted value system in the society at a point in time.
The societal approach to the study of marketing is relatively recent and was born out of the criticism of the marketing behavior of businesses obsessed with profit attainment a growth by such critics as Galbraith, Packard, and Marcuse.
Systems Approach
Among the recent approaches to the study of marketing, the one that has been engaging considerable attention lately is the system approach.
It is based on Von Bertalanffy’s “general system theory.” He defined the system as a “set of objects together with the relationships among them and their attributes.
Systems thinking recognizes the inter¬relations and interconnections among the components of a marketing system in which products, services, money, equipment, and information flow from marketers to consumers.
These flows largely determine the survival and growth capacities of a firm. Therefore, the focus of the systems approach is the analysis of these marketing files and communication. It stresses built-in organizational capacity to adapt the business to a changing ecosystem.