Over the past year I have been studying marketing at the School of Commerce. I have become a lot more interested in marketing. In this article I am going to talk about the definition of marketing and my findings about the subject. I will also give tips and tricks for those who want to start in the marketing field, or are thinking about studying at the School of Commerce.

Definition of marketing

Marketing is a very broad subject, but the most simplistic definition of marketing is ‘responding to the whishes and needs from customers’. It means that you first need to know what kind of product or service a customer or person wants, and then develop it to sell it to that person. In the past, companies did it the other way around. They first developed a product or service, and then sold those to customers, without doing research about the wishes and needs from their customers. Marketing is a more effective way of selling a product, because if you already know that people want, it is basically already sold. Of course there are a lot of things that you have to keep in mind before you can sell your product or service effectively, which I am going to talk about in the next paragraph.

My findings about marketing

So before you start developing a product or service, you first need to have a target audience, or a ‘niche’. Because there are almost 8 billion people on the planet and everybody has different interests and needs, you need to specify which people you want to focus on. The more detailed your target audience is, the more effectively you can respond to their whishes and needs. If you have a better understanding of the audience you want to serve, you need to identify their whishes and needs through different criteria, such as their age, income, interests, behaviour. There are a lot of other criterias which you can use for this. The point is that you have to be able to describe your target audience as specific as possible. Then you can start focusing on developing the product or service, pricing, distribution and promotion, so that you can reach that target audience. Some people say that marketing is some sort of manipulation of people, which I don’t agree with, because I think it is a form of serving or helping people with their problems or desires more effectively.

Tips and tricks

It is impossible to describe the entire subject in one article, so if you are interested in learning more about marketing, I suggest that you follow some form of education, and maybe start your own side project, like building your own business or helping others with promoting their products and services. I really enjoy the School of Commerce, because I think it is a very practical course. You can implement the information right away when developing products and services that people want, and there are a lot of opportunities. If you are not quite sure what target audience you want to serve, it could be useful to find out what you are interested in, and use that as your niche. That way, you already know a lot about the topic, and it makes it a lot easier to identify what people in that niche are interested in. Besides that, you enjoy it more, which is the most important thing.

Thank you for reading this article, and have a wondeful day.