Marketing must play the leading role in shaping business strategy as Philip Kotler said, marketing is the social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging product and value with others.
A product is anything that can be offered to a market for attention, use or assumption that might satisfy a want or need. It includes physical objects, services, persons, places, organization and ideas.
Marketing holds that achieving organizational goals depends on determining the needs and wants of target markets and delivering the desired satisfaction more effectively and efficiently than competitors do. Thus marketing starts with identifying consumer needs , then the product and services are planned according to the needs of the customer rather than the availability of materials and machinery.
The goal of marketing is to attract new customers and keeping them by delivery satisfaction. The focus of this concept is on customer orientation.
MARKETING RESEARCH A company obtained hundreds of idea from internal and external customers, sales people etc, in order to ascertain the need for producing a new product through market research activities. Marketing research is a link between consumer and public to the marketer through information that is used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems, to generate, refine and evaluate marketing action, to monitor marketing performance, and to improve understanding of the marketing process.
For instance apple computer wants to know how many and what kind of people or companies will buy its new ultra light personal computer. Marketing research specify the information need to address marketing issues, design the method for collecting information,manage and implement the data collection process,analyse the results and communicate the findings and their implication.
FORCASTING
The organization must plan and predict what