Marketing in an enterprise - its role and importance

Many people, especially those with a mathematical mind, sometimes ask the question - what really is this marketing? Is there any way to learn it? After all, it is such a qualitative field that putting it into any strict framework makes its activities lose their meaning. And yet the industry still exists, what's more, it is growing at an incredible pace, using the latest technologies and the ever-emerging new media.

Without fail, more media agencies are appearing on the market, employing talented people who show incredible creativity. So it would seem that although this is a difficult subject to research and describe, there is something to this marketing.

And yes - it is. Thousands of studies have already been written describing the fundamentals on which advertising is based and, most importantly, the methods it uses. From a marketing point of view, however, this is already standard. To show what the work of the marketing department in a modern company really consists of, you need to go one step further and look at the operation of specialists in this field. Their work is based on a basic element that cannot be missing from any project - creativity. Each successive advertising campaign must stand out in the market, so that it does not get lost in the maze of competitors' ads. It should therefore reach potential buyers of the product or service in such a way as to attract their attention. Achieving this goal, however, is not an easy task, just as it is not easy to learn to be creative - after all, it is in the very nature of man to behave according to patterns and follow the beaten paths. Yet it is possible to acquire this trait over time, although it takes work and effort.

However, marketing activities need to be combined with the other functions of the enterprise, so that they form a coherent whole. Here is where the problem often arises - how not to limit this very creative group of marketing specialists, and at the same time effectively implement them in the orderly schemes of the enterprise, which is the element required to ensure its effectiveness. With the passage of time and the ongoing changes in the approach to advertising and sales, specialists have proposed further schemes to show the role of marketing in the modern enterprise, of which the most commonly used two are:

1. Marketing as an equivalent function to the others, i.e. production, finance and human resources. This approach is characteristic of sales-oriented companies, maintaining that customers left to their own devices will not buy enough products.
2. Marketing as a function that integrates other elements, focused on the customer. An approach characteristic of customer-oriented companies, trying to understand their needs and find answers to them.

These two opposite approaches, representing quite different ways of thinking about the customer, are the most popular today. The first is usually practiced when a company wants to sell what it produces, rather than what the market needs. Its managers think that the product they have created will be interesting enough for the customer to decide to buy. The latter approach emerged in the mid-1950s and challenged the previous one. Companies operating according to this principle decided to understand the customer and respond to his desires by presenting him with a ready-made solution to satisfy those needs. Thus, there was a need to develop communication between the customer and the company, and this gave birth to new marketing techniques to study the market and the requirements of the potential buyer. Combined with the creativity of marketing specialists, they are an incredibly effective tool, allowing the company to achieve success. However, this is not an easy road - it requires, first of all, a change in thinking, which in many cases is very ingrained in us.