Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Marketing is a widely used term to describe the means of communication between the company and the consumer audience. Marketing is the adaptation of the commercial activities and use of institutions by the organizations with a purpose to induce behavioural change on a short-term or permanent basis. The American Marketing Association most recently defined Marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” The techniques used in marketing include choosing target markets through market analysis and market segmentation, as well as understanding methods of influence on the consumer behaviour. From a societal point of view, marketing provides the link between a society’s material requirements and its economic patterns of response. This way marketing satisfies these needs and wants through the development of exchange processes and the building of long-term relationships. In the case of non-profit organization marketing, the aim is to increase and deliver an ethos message about the organization’s services to the applicable audience. Governments often employ marketing to communicate messages with a social purpose, such as a public health or safety message, to citizens. On the other hand, marketing strategy is an action plan or a set of plans intended to achieve specific goals or objectives over a period of time. Marketing strategy is action plan on how an organization intends to achieve its marketing objectives. Shaw (2012) explained that strategy is a broad statement of the way which an organization sets out to accomplished its objectives.
Marketing strategy is therefore a process of strategically analysing environmental competitiveness and business factors affecting business units, and forecasting functional trends in business areas of interest to the enterprise (Scrizzi, 2007). Aaker (2008) defined marketing strategy as a process that can allow organization to concentrate resources on optimal opportunities with goals of increasing sales and achieving sustainable competitive advantage. Based on the foregoing statement, it can therefore be said that marketing strategy is an organisation’s strategy that combines all of its marketing goals into one comprehensive plan. It involves participating in selling business objectives and formulating corporate and business unit strategies. Marketing strategy involves all basic and long term marketing activities of an organization including strategic direction of the organization, formulation, evaluation and selection of market-oriented strategies that therefore contribute to the goals of the organization and its marketing objectives, which is to satisfy consumers profitably. The ultimate objective of any marketing strategy is consumer’s satisfaction without which no organization can meet its goals.
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