The marketing process consists of four elements: strategic marketing analysis, marketing-mix planning, marketing implementation, and marketing control.

The aim of marketing in profit-oriented organizations is to meet needs profitably. Companies must therefore first define which needs—and whose needs—they can satisfy. For example, the personal transportation market consists of people who put different values on an automobile’s cost, speed, safety, status, and styling. No single automobile can satisfy all these needs in a superior fashion; compromises have to be made. Furthermore, some individuals may wish to meet their personal transportation needs with something other than an automobile, such as a motorcycle, a bicycle, or a bus or other form of public transportation. Because of such variables, an automobile company must identify the different preference groups, or segments, of customers and decide which group(s) they can target profitably.

Segments can be divided into even smaller groups, called subsegments or niches. A niche is defined as a small target group that has special requirements. For example, a bank may specialize in serving the investment needs of not only senior citizens but also senior citizens with high incomes and perhaps even those with particular investment preferences. It is more likely that larger organizations will serve the larger market segments (mass marketing) and ignore niches. As a result, smaller companies typically emerge that are intimately familiar with a particular niche and specialize in serving its needs.

A growing number of companies are now trying to serve “segments of one.” They attempt to adapt their offer and communication to each individual customer. This is understandable, for instance, with large industrial companies that have only a few major customers. For example, The Boeing Company (United States) designs its 747 planes differently for each major customer, such as United Airlines, Inc., or American Airlines, Inc. Serving individual customers is increasingly possible with the advent of database marketing, through which individual customer characteristics and purchase histories are retained in company information systems. Even mass-marketing companies, particularly large retailers and catalog houses, compile comprehensive data on individual customers and are able to customize their offerings and communications.

A key step in marketing strategy, known as positioning, involves creating and communicating a message that clearly establishes the company or brand in relation to competitors. Thus, Volvo Aktiebolaget (Sweden) positioned its automobile as the “safest,” and Daimler AG (Germany), manufacturer of Mercedes-Benz vehicles, positioned its car as the best “engineered.” Some products may be positioned as “outstanding” in two or more ways. However, claiming superiority along several dimensions may hurt a company’s credibility because consumers will not believe that any single offering can excel in all dimensions. Furthermore, although the company may communicate a particular position, customers may perceive a different image of the company as a result of their actual experiences with the company’s product or through word of mouth.

Having developed a strategy, a company must then decide which tactics will be most effective in achieving strategy goals. Tactical marketing involves creating a marketing mix of four components—product, price, place, promotion—that fulfills the strategy for the targeted set of customer needs.

The first marketing-mix element is the product, which refers to the offering or group of offerings that will be made available to customers. In the case of a physical product, such as a car, a company will gather information about the features and benefits desired by a target market. Before assembling a product, the marketer’s role is to communicate customer desires to the engineers who design the product or service. This is in contrast to past practice, when engineers designed a product based on their own preferences, interests, or expertise and then expected marketers to find as many customers as possible to buy this product. Contemporary thinking calls for products to be designed based on customer input and not solely on engineers’ ideas.

In traditional economies, the goods produced and consumed often remain the same from one generation to the next—including food, clothing, and housing. As economies develop, the range of products available tends to expand, and the products themselves change. In contemporary industrialized societies, products, like people, go through life cycles: birth, growth, maturity, and decline. This constant replacement of existing products with new or altered products has significant consequences for professional marketers. The development of new products involves all aspects of a business—production, finance, research and development, and even personnel administration and public relations.

Packaging and branding are also substantial components in the marketing of a product. Packaging in some instances may be as simple as customers in France carrying long loaves of unwrapped bread or small produce dealers in Italy wrapping vegetables in newspapers or placing them in customers’ string bags. In most industrialized countries, however, the packaging of merchandise has become a major part of the selling effort, as marketers now specify exactly the types of packaging that will be most appealing to prospective customers. The importance of packaging in the distribution of the product has increased with the spread of self-service purchases—in wholesaling as well as in retailing. Packaging is sometimes designed to facilitate the use of the product, as with aerosol containers for room deodorants. In Europe such condiments as mustard, mayonnaise, and ketchup are often packaged in tubes. Some packages are reusable, making them attractive to customers in poorer countries where metal containers, for instance, are often highly prized. Customers in wealthier countries may prefer packaging that can be recycled.

The same general marketing approach about the product applies to the development of service offerings as well. For example, a health maintenance organization (HMO) must design a contract for its members that describes which medical procedures will be covered, how much physician choice will be available, how out-of-town medical costs will be handled, and so forth. In creating a successful service mix, the HMO must choose features that are preferred and expected by target customers, or the service will not be valued in the marketplace.