When you think about cola, what do you think? Coke? Pepsi? That's due to marketing. What comes to mind when you think of computers? Dell? Apple? IBM? That's no coincidence. Those companies have spent a lot of money so that you'll associate a generic product such as a computer with a brand name.
Broadly speaking, marketing is the intermediary function between product development and sales. In a nutshell, it's the marketer's job to ensure that consumers look beyond price and functionality when they're weighing consumption options.
What You'll Do Marketers create, manage, and enhance brands. (A brand can be thought of as the way consumers perceive a particular company or its products and how a company reinforces or enhances those perceptions through its overall communicationsóits logo, advertising, packaging, and so on.) Marketers want the consumer to ask: "Which brand helps me look and feel my best? Which brand can I trust?" Their goal is to make the brand they represent the obvious and uncontested answer to those questions in the consumer's mind. In marketing terms, this is called owning mind share.
Of course, a brand can't be all things to all people. A key part of a marketer's job is to understand the needs, preferences, and constraints that define the target group of consumers (who may be from the same geographic region, income level, age range, lifestyle, or interest group) or the market niche corresponding to the brand. How can a company aggressively expand its market share and keep customers satisfied? That question is central to everything a marketer does.
Who Does Well Marketing appeals to creative thinkers as well as to numbers-minded statisticians. Engineers, for example, work with customers to help define new products (a marketing function); psychologists analyze consumer behavior so that marketers can better target their promotions. A single purpose underlies the diversity of opportunity and the variety of marketing roles: to create something customers will want and to communicate why they should want it.
