Marketing Function - Definition & Importance
What is Marketing Function?
Marketing function is a role which helps a company to identify and source potentially successful products for the marketplace they operate on and then promote them by differentiating them from similar products. It is a vital part of any company.
Typical marketing function types within a larger business includes performing market research, making marketing plan, and product development, market development, market penetration as well as strategically taking care of advertising, distribution for sale, pricing, after sales customer service and public relations.
Importance of Marketing Function
Along with Sales, Support, Manufacturing and Finance, the marketing function is one of the pillars of any organization. Lot of critical activities like market research and planning are performed by the marketing department. Overall branding, product design, media strategy, distribution are all initiated by the marketing department.
The most important aspect of any business are the customers. The marketing function understand the customer requirements, feedback to make sure that the right product or service offering reaches the market under the brand name.
Different marketing tasks
There are various tasks which come under the marketing function.
Some of the important ones are:
1. Market Planning
One of the most important functions of marketing is to plan, research the market trends. The entire planning exercise is done by the marketing department/function.
Market planning takes the entire organization's view and strategy to make sure that the right market strategy and tactics are used for designing and developing the product/service offering for the customers.
2. Product Design
Product life cycle design and management is an important task performed by the marketing function. The entire PLC is management by the marketing function. Product design includes product functionalities, customer requirements, research and development activities. Branding is also included in this step.
3. Product development
After the product is designed, the product has to be developed as per the design. It includes prototyping, testing, test marketing, user feedback etc.
After the confirmation, the product is handed over to manufacturing for development.
4. Distribution
Though distribution is main responsibility of operations and logistics department, the marketing function has a vital role to play in terms of market plan, locations, distribution strategy in making sure that product reaches the right location
5. Financing
Marketing function also has inputs in financing. To make sure that the right audience is able to buy and afford the product. Marketing department plays important role in pricing, financing along with the finance department.
6. Sales Support
Once the product is ready to be shipped and made available in the market, the sales force needs to be enabled to understand the product offerings including features, pricing, promotions, margins etc. to make sure that sales is able to sell it effectively.
7. Packaging and Labelling
Marketing function has the responsibility of planning the artwork and labelling as per the protocols and branding. The packaging and labelling has to be in sync with the production schedule.
8. Customer Service and Support
Aftermarket support is very much an important aspect of marketing function. The customer may have queries or require support for the product usage or repair.
The marketing function needs to enable the support and technical staff to answer the customer queries.
9. Market Research and Development
Market research is an ongoing task of the marketing department. Marketing function needs to understand the market and target audience well to make sure that the right product features are designed and developed.
Hence, this concludes the definition of Marketing Function along with its overview.
This article has been researched & authored by the Business Concepts Team. It has been reviewed & published by the MBA Skool Team. The content on MBA Skool has been created for educational & academic purpose only.
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