For understanding the customer, marketplace and their behaviour; five core concepts need to be mastered.
All marketing efforts are made for attracting customer, serving superior value and capturing return value for the customer in a superior routine than the competitors in the marketplace who are in competition with the same motive.
So, understanding the customer, the marketplace and their behaviour is essential for any marketing decision and action.
Marketing pundits and gurus have examined the customer, the marketplace and way it behaves is situations. They have identified and acknowledged that there are five core concepts customer and marketplace that needed to be mastered;
1. Needs, wants, and demands;
2. Market offerings (products, services, and experiences);
3. Value and satisfaction;
4. Exchanges and relationships; and
5. Markets.
1. Needs, Wants, and Demands
Most basic concept of fundamental marketing is that of human needs, wants, and demands. Human needs are states of felt deprivation. Marketers did not create these needs; they are a primary part of the human makeup.
Basic physical needs for food, clothing, warmth, and safety; social needs for belonging and affection; and individual needs for knowledge and self-expression; are needs of human.
Wants are needs shaped by culture and individual personality. Every human being requires food but what form they take food is different dew to cultural and social attributes of an individual. One person may like a burger or hot-dog another might like french fries or rich.
Individuals’ cultural and social features shape the wants. With buying power, wants become demands. Needs and wants drive people to demand for products and services.
2. Market Offerings
Consumers’ needs and wants are satisfied through market offerings. Market offerings are some combination, mixture, or blend of physical products, services, information, ideas, or experiences offered to a market to satisfy a need or a want.
Examples of market offerings are everywhere. From coke’s “open happiness” adverts’ to a simple banner in a webpage; market offerings are finding you no matter where you go-online or offline.
For any sellers putting the best blend of offers in a market offering is the challenge. Many of them make the mistake named as “marketing myopia” – paying more attention to the specific products they offer than to the benefits and experiences produced by these products.
Here they are so hooked with their products that they focus only on existing wants and lose sight of customer needs.
They forget that a product is only a tool to solve a consumer problem. “market offerings”- that gets results for the sellers puts the customers’ need, wants, and demands first.
3. Value and Satisfaction
Consumers usually face a wide-ranging array of products and services in forms of “market offerings” that might satisfy a certain need. How do they choose among these many market offerings?
A customer always forms expectations about the value and satisfaction that various market offerings will deliver and buy them for that reason. Customer value and customer satisfaction are key building blocks for developing and managing customer relationships.
Marketers must be careful to set the right level of expectations. Overcooked it or under-cooked market offerings will not help the marketers capture value in return of the customer satisfaction.
Satisfied customers will buy again and tell others about their good experiences on the other hand dissatisfied customers will eventually switch to competitors and surely disparage the product to others.
4. Exchanges and Relationships
Marketing occurs when people decide to satisfy their needs and wants through exchange relationships. Exchange is the act of obtaining a desired object from someone by offering something in return. Marketer tries to bring about a response to some market offering.
By this; marketers tries to build and maintain profitable exchange relationships with target audiences interested in exchange.
5. Markets
The concepts of exchange and relationships lead to the concept of market. A market is the set of actual and potential buyers of a product or service. Marketing efforts are undertaken for controlling markets to bring about profitable customer relationships.
For creating these relationships marketers must search for buyers and their needs, design good market offerings, set prices for them, promote them, and store and deliver them.
Activities such as consumer research, product development, communication, distribution, pricing, and service are must in order to stay ahead of the competitors in the market