Marketing in the Digital Age: Consumers at the Heart of the Market - Essay Sample

Introduction

One of the common goals that marketers aim at achieving is to put the consumers at the heart of the market (Gary, Kotler & Opresnik, 21). To thrive in the market today, a business ought to create customer value and engage in the social and digital marketplace that is fast-changing. To meet a good marketer, one first needs to be conversant with the needs and wants of the consumers, and establish the target market that the business can fit well into, and then coming up with an attractive value proposition that will not only+ attract, but also grow valued customers. The marketers today are not just about making sales, but also encouraging the customers to identify themselves with their products and be ambassadors of the same wherever they are either in their talks or deeds. Today, marketers have developed a set of dazzling new social media tools, mobile for engaging their customers anytime and anywhere and to jointly shape the experiences, brand conversations, and the community (Gary, Kotler & Opresnik, 21). If marketers were able to do these things correctly, then they can be able to gain excessively by increasing their market share, customer equity, and profits.

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The only business function that deals with the customers than any other is the marketing function. Marketing can be defined as the engagement of customers and managing profitable customer relationships. Marketing has two primary goals in business. The first goal that every marketer aims at achieving is to attract new customers into the market by promising them superior value, and the second goal n to keep and maintain the already existing customer by ensuring that they deliver satisfaction to them. For an organization to be successful, there is a need for it to have excellent and sound marketing. Marketing revolves or lives almost everywhere from the schools, to the churches, at home, and any other place that we go to you will always see some element of marketing. However, whatever meets our casual eye is not all that happens in marketing. There are a lot of things that happen behind the scenes in marketing, and they include things such as technology, the network of people, and the activities competing for your attention and purchase.

Marketing concepts do not just stop at the classroom but follows you up in your day to day life as a business student or person. For me, marketing and the various concepts within marketing have had significant positive impacts in my life in several ways. One of the essential ideas that have greatly assisted me in my life is the concept of a new product development strategy. From this concept, I learned that apart from buying a product or acquiring a product that is already existing, a business or a firm could also come up with its product through the process of new product development (Gary, Kotler & Opresnik, 266). When we talk about a new product here, there are several meanings attached to it. It could either mean that a firm is coming up with a completely new product or service, improving on an already existing product, or coming up with a new brand (Gary, Kotler & Opresnik, 266). However, it is essential to note that in coming up with a new product, it must be through the individual effort of the firm through its research and development department. The process of new product development had significantly assisted me in my life especially when I got some part-time job in the marketing department of a given company, and I managed during a meeting to make significant contributions that would then see the company thrive in the competitive market. New product development concept enables companies, like the one I once worked for, to experience organic growth. To become successful in the ever-growing business competition in the world, and to keep up with the insatiable needs of the consumers and their changing consumer behaviors, it is important to always come up with new products.

Another aspect of marketing that has impacted my life as a business student is the element of customer engagement. In business, engaging the customers is an essential aspect that business people have to treat with a lot of seriousness if they have to win a larger market share than their competitors. I have been a beneficiary of this concept in my engagement with people the little businesses that I have always done. How the customer relates to the brands has significantly changed in the world of today as technology has taken over and changed how things are done (Gary, Kotler & Opresnik, 46). The use of the internet and other social media platforms and computer apps have brought up a lot of changes in how people on earth relate to each other. To me, I can say that the knowledge of internet marketing has been of critical help to me as it always makes it easy to reach a large number of people within a short time. The use of the internet as a means of marketing is cheap since no vast amount of resources are required for movement up and down convincing customers, but rather, everything is done online by the click of a button.

Another concept that I have always found interesting to me as it has a direct impact on my life is the concept of connecting brands with consumers which is under retailing. As a retailer, I have at one point understood the significance of being a retailer and how important it is to conduct marketing at the retailing level. The final phase of the buying process is the essential phase in marketing, and this implies that retailers have a significant role to play. Today most of the marketers are trying to shift to shopper marketing, and they focus on the entire marketing process (Gary, Kotler & Opresnik, 362). Shopper marketing is where the marketing process is now moving from the product and brand development, logistics, promotion, and merchandising; and the shoppers are now turned into buyers as the product approaches the point of sale. It is true that every well-designed marketing effort should be focused on the behavior of the customer buying the product (Gary, Kotler & Opresnik, 362). The shopper marketing concepts are different due to the suggestions that its coordination occurs around the process of shopping itself.

Marketing ethics is also another concept that I cannot fail to mention when I am saying how marketing can help me in my life. The word ethics holds a vast meaning in it, and it should be treated with a lot of caution whenever it is mentioned. Marketing is a broad discipline and exercise and times it can come along with challenges if ethics is not put into consideration. It is critical to ensure that you abide with the business and or marketing laws during the advertisement of a product to avowing unflinching to other people's rights or demeaning other companies' products in an evident manner. An interesting example of ethics in the advertisement is the case of Jeff Bezos the founder and CEO at Amazon. When he went on a 60 minute TV interview to illustrate how his company was planning to use drones for door delivery of its products to the consumers, it turned out to be controversial. Such an excellent idea could not be implemented since the FAA did not allow such use of drones and only suggested that such an improvement would only be possible to implement maybe after 2026 (Gary, Kotler & Opresnik, 424). The aspect of ethics comes in here because Bezos did not take the initiative to follow all the due processes to determine if such a move could be possible by doing an intensive consultation with his team. With my knowledge in marketing ethics, I have always managed to keep myself on the right track by ensuring that I do not infringe other people's rights while doing my advertisement or marketing.

In human history, business ethics has been considered to be among some of the most contentious and complicated subjects. Both business leaders and academics have studied the relationship between making money and doing the right thing, and no definite conclusion has been reached at, making the issue to remain a controversy to date. Ethical marketing is more of a philosophy and less of a marketing strategy informing all marketing efforts. In marketing, when we talk about practicing ethics then what we mean here is that the business person deliberately applies fairness standards, or makes business decisions based on moral wrongs and rights. Usually, in a business economy, people tend to think that a business works to the best of its interest without considering what the impacts could cause to the environment or the people attached to it. It is for this particular reason that it becomes hard to trust businesses and let them work in a free environment, instead, rules and laws have been put in place to monitor how companies operate, and one of the critical areas where the states look at is the element of advertisement or marketing. Several businesses have gone on board to deceive consumers by providing wrong information on their products hence luring millions of people to buy the products and or services with the aim that they are what they are told to be. Certain circumstances have even led to illness and even loss of death in some cases.

Personal selling is another concept that has proven critical in my life as a student and as an athlete as well. According to Robert Louis, everyone lives by selling something (428). At a personal level as an athlete, I sometimes have to show off my skills to others to gain my favor so that I can be able to be picked to play big tournaments and earn some money. This is what personal selling would imply to an individual's life, and as Louis puts it, it is indeed true that everyone lives by selling something. Around the world, the companies are using sales forces in the selling of their services and products to the final consumers. However, many other organizations also today employ the use of sales forces. For instance, an organization like the church uses members committee in the attraction of new members whereas schools or colleges use recruiters to attract new students. It is argued out that one of the oldest professions in the world in personal selling. Other people tend to draw bad images in their minds when they hear of a salesperson and others even stereotype them due to reasons well known to them. However, it is essential to realize that most of the sales people are very different from what most people think they are.

Another interesting concept from the class textbook is the concept of sustainable marketing. By definition, sustainable marketing can be termed as the marketing means that calls for environmentally and socially responsible actions that meet the existing business and consumer needs while at the same time enhancing or preserving the ability of the future generations to meet their needs as well (Gary, Kotler & Opresnik, 518). When I first saw this topic, I was delighted, and I had a lot of joy to learn that marketing can also have the element of sustainability. The environment is one of the essential thins that the human race have, and we should be able to preserve and protect it so that our children and the children of our children may be able to find it exactly how we found it or even in a better state. It, therefore, calls for the aspect of sustainability which is merely a state of being responsible with how we use our environment to avoid exhausting of the available resources. We also have the social context of sustainability, and here, we should also protect our culture and values and pass it on to our children as fresh as it is. When we learn to appreciate our environment, we will live in a very healthy world free from illness and other hazardous elements such as the harmful chemicals that we are experiencing today. However, moving directly to my point, the aspect of sustainable marketing is...