Marketing Basics for Your Retail Store

What Is Marketing and what role does it play in your business operations?

General Definition

Marketing represents the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.

Marketing produces a win-win situation because:

• Customers can get a product that meets their needs and
• The company achieves profits which allow the company to continue to do business in order to meet the needs of future customers

Basically, it’s essential to focus on what the customer wants when it comes to marketing. This must also be balanced with the company's objective of maintaining a profitable volume of sales that will help the company, your small retail business to continue to do business.

How Are The Customer And Business Objectives Met?

In simple, you need to plan and execute the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services in order to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives.

Basically the above means that you need to know what products customers want to buy. Providing the features and quality customers want is critical in marketing. If you provide something that you want to produce and try to convince someone else to buy it, you’ll be facing an uphill battle

The marketing process continues with setting a price and letting potential customers know about your product and then making it available to them.

What Activities Are Included In Marketing?

The activities are varied and numerous since they basically include everything needed to get a product off the drawing board and into the hands of the customer

Note that the field of marketing includes sales, but also many other functions. Don’t think that marketing and sales are the same -they are not.

How Does Marketing Fit into the Company?

Think that marketing activities are intertwined with all your other business functions.

Marketing helps make decisions and strategies that are implemented and concern:

• What products (services , goods, or ideas) are to be offered
• To whom (the target market)
• How (how to make the transaction, how to inform potential customers of the offering, etc)

A marketing approach will rely upon the coordination of several business areas to be successful. For example:

• The product might need some tweaking by producer of the product to respond to customer complaints.
• The person who handles human resource issues might be asked to develop compensation plans that reward sales people who build significant relationships that have tremendous potential, but are slow to close.
• Special payment plans might need to be implemented by the accounting staff to accommodate a variety of customer needs.

As you can see, marketing crosses more departmental boundaries out of necessity than other business functions do. Marketing requires that everyone who plays a part in the common goal of pleasing the customer to work together. For a small usiness owner who has no employees, this basically means that he/she needs to mentally tear down the walls between varied business functions and think holistically when it comes to marketing strategies.

Make sure you read Retail Marketing Pitfalls.