Mktg3024 Successful Business: With Or Assessment Answers

Answer

Introduction

Business is a process where marketing strategies are planned to make an appeal to the consumers for the purpose of selling their products. Marketing is one of the most important component of any business. The purpose of marketing in a business is to understand the market to create target based promotional strategies. Proper marketing strategies keep the consumers satisfied and retained, and thus increases profit for the business. Marketing focuses on the demand of the consumers and society while making strategies. As per Saunders, Barrington & Sridharan (2015), social marketing concept is type of marketing process that utilizes marketing principles to apply individual and collective activities and ideas in order to transform society in ways that are effective, sustained, efficient and fair. The purpose of this essay is to find whether a business can be successful without social marketing.

Arguments

According to Fine (2017), the revised version of the definition of marketing by the American Marketing Association (AMA) in 1985 was significant in its addition of the term ideas with the term goods and services, as he considers it as an important mark  of the social media concept. The recent definition of marketing by the American Marketing Association is “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for consumers, clients, partners, and society at large.” ("Definition of Marketing", 2013). Among all the changes made by the AMA in this definition, the crucial one is the term value for society at large. It clearly emphasizes on the fact that marketing must include a social purpose in its process to make a business successful. In this time of global awareness, consumers are more attracted to organizations that are related to a social cause. Social marketing approaches are focused on social problems and helps creating platforms that are large in scale and have broader base in order to improve the focused condition (Hastings & Domegan, 2013). Therefore, it has the ability to grow social concern among the people and attract them to the marketed products, services and ideas that help to reduce or resolve a social problem. In this way, a business can become successful by intriguing their consumers successfully.

One of the greatest problems of the current century is that it has a steady growth of social problems. Social awareness is increasing among the people all over the world. While conventional or commercial marketing seeks separate profits for several stakeholders, social marketing aims to achieve success in society as well as in business. Therefore, it is important to view social marketing as an integral part of marketing in the present century of increasing social problems (Lefebvre, 2013). It is not possible for the general marketing strategies to overcome a social problem. Yet, they are applied in programs that deal with social problems. As per Akinsanya & Bch (2014), it is possible to achieve success in business by applying social marketing strategies for the purpose of serving the social causes. Moreover, technological use in social marketing make it easier for the business organizations to make a better segmentation of the market in order to make a successful application of the social market strategies. As social marketing targets social problems as their primary goal, it is the most convenient strategy for the recent times. There are several social problems, both existing and emerging, that needs the attention of the people. Social problems that related to health, domestic violence, abuse and environment have been successfully reduced in many places with the help of social marketing (Dibb & Carrigan, 2013).

Social marketing is comparatively new approach in the marketing and thus, is still under the study and development. As Goldberg, Fishbein & Middlestadt (2018) say, there are difficulties in determining the process in which social marketing could be used most effectively for the success of the businesses. As a novel approach, it has lack of clarity and easily misunderstood and misapplied. There is trend of applying social marketing where it is not applicable which results in a poor performance of the business organizations. Instead of social marketing, these businesses need conventional marketing in order to have success. Although it can involve social issues in the marketing plan, the main objective of other conventional marketing concepts is to increase the profits of the stakeholders such as shareholders, investors, consumers, suppliers, and buyers. While various social problem is indeed are growing concerns for the people all around the world, not every person is interested in donating or getting involved in one. Moreover, the purpose of marketing in general is to satisfaction and retention of the consumers. Without social marketing, it is possible to do that by focusing on the individual needs of the consumers (Hill & Alexander, 2017). Shareholders and investors can easily be satisfied if the business is making growth in its profit. Thus, it is possible to achieve success in business without social marketing.

Conclusion

Social marketing undoubtedly has more appeal to the consumers as the approach of social marketing is that people matters. When a business applies social marketing, it invokes the thought in the mind of the consumers that the business is not only aiming for monetary success, but also has target to participate directly for a social cause; and by involving with that business, they will also donate to that cause. Social marketing has the capability to achieve success even in complex situations by creating an integrated solution that involves all the stakeholders, and this way it connects people with shared interests. Although, social marketing is a comparatively new marketing concept, it will be justified to say that in the context of present social problems, it is not possible for the businesses to achieve success without social marketing.

Reference List

Definition of Marketing. (2013). Retrieved from https://www.ama.org/AboutAMA/Pages/Definition-of-Marketing.aspx

Dibb, S., & Carrigan, M. (2013). Social marketing transformed: Kotler, Polonsky and Hastings reflect on social marketing in a period of social change. European Journal of Marketing, 47(9), 1376-1398.

Fine, S. H. (2017). Introduction to social marketing. In Marketing the Public Sector (pp. 1-12). Routledge.

Goldberg, M. E., Fishbein, M., & Middlestadt, S. E. (2018). Social marketing: Theoretical and practical perspectives. Psychology Press.

Hastings, G., & Domegan, C. (2013). Social marketing. Routledge.

Hill, N., & Alexander, J. (2017). The handbook of customer satisfaction and loyalty measurement. Routledge.

Lefebvre, R. C. (2013). Social marketing and social change: Strategies and tools for improving health, well-being, and the environment. John Wiley & Sons.