The Role of Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4500 words

The Role of Marketing - Essay Example The intimate, and inextricable, connection between organisational success and marketing, insofar as the primary objective of the former is to ensure the latter through the creation and maximization of well-targeted demand, is a historically undeniable reality, amply supported by a wealth of empirical evidence (Church, 1999). The undeniable centrality of marketing communication to organisational success functioned as the basis for the embrace of marketing by academia and the evolution of marketing as an academic field within management sciences (Cohen, 1966). Earlier perceptions of marketing as interchangeable with advertising, with the former being defined simply as a strategy to attract consumer interest in a product, have fundamentally changed. Marketing has, ever since the mid-1960s, been recognized as a complex methodology for the fulfilment of an organization's strategic objectives, insofar as sales, the expansion of market shares, and organisational growth are concerned. As such, and within the context of the aforementioned definition for marketing, the former evolved into a science embracing methodologies for market analysis and study; strategies for the identification of the most susceptible consumer groups/target audience; and countless theories on effective communication strategies and tools f or the engendering of consumer interest and product/service demand (Cohen, 1966; Dibb and Simkin, 1994). In other words, the increasing recognition of marketing as the key to organisational success has led to its embrace by academia and its subsequent evolution into a science,' designed to articulate a set of strategies, tools and methodologies as would ensure organisational success through marketing. There is no doubt that recent technological innovations in communication sciences, bordering on the revolutionary, have significantly redefined marketing strategies and media. Marketing has not only expanded beyond the local to embrace the global but marketing media and strategies have undergone revolutionary transformations consequent to the evolution of variant forms of electronic media, from the radio to the internet (Wehner, 2001). Marketing, as a communications strategy designed to inform consumers of the availability of particular products and persuade the market of the utility of these products, has evolved into integrated marketing.'