Marketing Reflects the Needs and Wants of Customers

Marketing reflects the needs and wants of customers

The question of the nature of marketing and it’s role in understanding or shaping the needs and wants of customers is certainly complicated and cannot be easily discerned without some qualifications. Certainly for every example of a company that uses marketing to better understand customers and help meet the needs of those people there is another company that attempts to use techniques from the marketing discipline for the purpose of manipulating people’s desires for their own short-term gain.

The key to clarity on the issue is to look at marketing in its pure form as a discipline which businesses undertake to aid them in accomplishing their purpose. With that qualification in place, it is simple to understand that a holistic marketing discipline reflects the needs and wants of customers while helping them to better understand how to meet those needs and wants.

In the realm of marketing (...) challenges are deepened by the need of a firm as a whole to simultaneously satisfy individual customer’s needs as well as societal needs, subject to the firm’s objectives. This marketing orientation is encapsulated in the marketing concept and bears clear similarities to the argument that, while making a profit is necessary to stay in business, from an ethical perspective firms should not distort their primary function as providers of a service to their customers (Pires & Stanton, 2002, p. 112).

The true purpose of marketing is to better equip a company to accomplish its primary function to provide a product or service to customers. An important piece to a holistic approach toward marketing is that an organization must “determine the needs, wants and interests of target markets and to deliver the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than competitors in a way that preserves or enhances the consumer’s and society’s long-term well-being” (Kotler & Keller, 2009, p.27).

A company begins this...