Marketing\' Tutorial Offers an Overview of Marketing

¶ … Marketing' tutorial offers an overview of marketing concepts in a straightforward, textbook-like manner. Part I focuses on definitions. Marketing is broken down into its essential components. This includes typical marketing strategy and tactics; the need for identifying, creating, and maintaining customers through research, and generating and sustaining value by fostering positive relationships with suppliers. It also lists important considerations when generating marketing campaigns such as determining target markets, product, promotions, distribution and prices.

However, while the general overview in Part I is useful to some degree, it is also extremely vague and uses no examples to 'ground' the generalizations in the real world. Marketing is not a theoretical discipline like philosophy: it is ultimately, a hands-on practical subject. Students are exposed to the concepts on a daily basis through advertising and other product promotions. Connections between the reader's daily life and marketing are never drawn.

The absence of visuals is another problem with the tutorial. Marketing would seem like an ideal subject to use visual examples, such as links to advertisements or video clips of product promotions. Instead, the website is extremely wordy, with no examples or graphics. There are also long passages on topics like the History of Marketing which are only tangentially relevant to the rest of the course, which is primarily conceptual in nature. The 'Criticisms of Marketing' section seems unnecessarily lengthy, particularly given the fact that the target audience is likely prospective businesspeople who will use marketing, regardless of the criticisms. While briefly touching upon some of the criticisms might be valid, the course content does not revolve around ethical debates about whether it is ethical to market to consumers at all. Additionally, the information in this section is phrased in a very vague fashion such as: "Fortunately, many countries offer customers some level of protection from misleading claims since such business practices may subject the marketer to legal action." What countries? What relevant laws?

Part II of the marketing tutorial discusses the importance of marketing research. Marketing research can include amassing data on customer demographics and desires, finding new methods of distribution, determining how to use new technology to create value, and also deploying quantitative analysis using concepts like price elasticity. Research helps determine the nature of 'audience' the marketers must 'pitch' to and understand. It also is a way in which to maximize value in terms of product creation, distribution, and determining the optimum price. However, Part II, much like Part I, lacks concrete examples. For example, it is asserted: "Relying on results of research conducted incorrectly to make decisions could prove problematic if not disastrous. Thousands of examples exist of firms using faulty research to make decisions, including many dot-com companies that failed between 1999 and 2002." The mistakes allegedly made by these companies are never 'spelled out.'

Most of the examples are given hypothetically rather than from life: "For example, if 40 salespeople out of 2,000-person corporate sales force participate in a research study focusing on company policy, is the information obtained from these 40 people sufficient to conclude how the entire sales forces feels about company policies? What if the same study was done again with 40 different salespeople, would the responses be similar?" There are no graphs to render the analysis in visual terms. This makes is difficult to understand how marketers use concepts such as elasticity of price and the types of quantitative in a meaningful fashion.

Part III is more psychologically-oriented in nature, focusing on Consumer Buying Behavior. This tutorial examines how consumers perceive the world around them, which will impact how marketing campaigns are directed. Consumer perception must be studied in a general fashion, as well as different consumers' individual personality and motivations. Consumer's self-worth and attitude are equally important as understanding their roles in life (such as a mother vs. A teenager, for example) and their income and lifestyle. The module does note that almost all consumers will exhibit decision-making processes that vary when buying a new vs. old purchase or a major vs. minor purchase. However, the tutorial does not discuss specific products and if different aspects of consumers' lifestyles are more important in the marketing of specific brands than others. For example, is the choice of a product like soda more influenced by income, lifestyle, and self-image -- versus a more practical product like car insurance that is not a visible object of consumption? Part IV examines the choices businesses make and their decision processes. Unsurprisingly, businesses tend to be more price rather than brand-driven then consumers, and more apt to use objective evidence.