RE: Marketing Plan -- draft

["John Williams" <JWilliams business otago ac nz>]

> This will probably come across as flippant, but anyway... 
> 
> I have always thought that marketing was more "Find out what
> people want, and then figure out how we can convince them that 
> what we have is that".
That is, again, selling or promotion, i.e. only one of the four Ps that
Claus was discussing.  The marketing attitude is, "if what we have is
not what they want, how can we change what we have?", i.e. manipulating
the product "P".

> It's in large part also about finding out which identifiable
> groups of people want what you have now, which is getting very
> close to what you call selling...
This is called "market segmentation and targeting"; and, like promotion,
is a sub-concept of marketing as a whole.  Once you have done that, then
you move on to planning your promotional ("selling") strategy.

Again, please forgive me if I am being overly academic.  We try to
instil these ideas in our undergraduate students, but far too many of
them graduate with the selling orientation (as opposed to the "true"
marketing orientation).  Sigh.