British Council-Marketing
Transcript of the podcast
Good morning everybody and welcome to this the first lecture on Marketing. I’ll be giving two lectures a week on this important business topic at this time on Tuesdays and Fridays until term ends. Right, well this morning I’d like to introduce you to some important concepts in marketing. As you know there are lots of different elements that go together to make up Marketing, we’ll look at the key elements during this course of lectures. I’d like to start with a general introduction today
In general terms marketing is all about making links or contacts between producers and consumers. To make these links it’s very important to find out and then deliver exactly what consumers want. What is a consumer? A consumer is a person or organisation that buys a product, it’s as simple as that. Once again marketing is all about finding out and then delivering what consumers want in a profitable way. ‘In a profitable way’ – this is obvious you may think, a company won’t last long if it delivers what customers want and loses money at the same time, well in fact it’s not quite as easy to achieve as you may think. We’ll be looking at the issue of pricing later in this series of lectures
A company should aim to satisfy their customers’ needs, good marketing helps the company to achieve this. I’d like to add an extra element now – a company should aim to satisfy their customers’ needs better than their competitors do. Again, we’ll look at the topic of competition, how to measure it and react to it later in this series of lectures
Today I want to introduce you to the concept of a customer focused organisation. A customer focused organisation is an organisation that takes the concerns of its customers seriously. There may be a marketing department in a customer focused organisation, if we’re talking about a small company there may not be one. One thing that all customer focused organisations have in common is that marketing, satisfying the needs of the organisation’s customers, is the concern of every employee. Everybody who works for this sort of company knows very well who their customers are and each employee works as a team to deliver a higher degree of customer satisfaction than their competitors
…How do we measure customer satisfaction? I hear you asking, well
Answers
N1. F / N2. F / N3. F / N4. T / N5. F / N6. T / N7. T
