Smiggle Marketing Approach and Analysis

Smiggle is an Australian based international stationary company created in 2003. The company offers a unique range of bright and colourful stationary products to customers, offering an alternative and distinct product to the market (smiggle.com.au, 2012). To continue to sell their product and generate a profit Smiggle must continue to engage in the marketing process to generate interest in their product and generate sales. This makes marketing an essential tool to businesses. Acting as a customer’s voice marketing informs the business of the markets wants and needs. In this manner marketing is explicitly linked to customer value, as the organisation must find a sense of need or desire within the customer and then create a product that meet it if they wish to remain in business. This essay will attempt to unpack the concept of marketing further, explaining its various processes and the importance of customer value in marketing. Marketing can be defined 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’ (American Marketing Association, 2007). From this definition it can be seen that marketing is the process by which an organisation communicates with customers to promote, create a sense of value and ultimately sell their concept or product (Gamble, Gilmore, McCartnan-Quinn and Durkan, 2011). As previously stated marketing is not a singular function but a process. This process consists of a four basic elements; identifying a want or need within a market; creating a strategy to market a product to fulfil this need; delivering and communicating value to the customer; and the retaining of customers through the maintenance of this perceived value (Kotler, Brown, Burton, Deans and Armstrong, 2010, pg. 6). The first step in the marketing process is to identify a need or want within the market to cater to. A need

References: 1) Kotler, P., Brown, L., Burton, S., Deans, K. and Armstrong, G., (2010) Marketing, 8th ed. Pearson Education 2) Smith and Colgate, (2007) Customer Value Creation: A Practical Framework, Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, Vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 7-23 3) Smiggle, (2012), About Us, retrieved from www.smiggle.com.au 4) American Marketing Association, (October 2007), Definitions of Marketing. Retrieved March 24, 2012 from http://www.marketingpower.com/AboutAMA/Pages/DefinitionofMarketing.aspx 5) Robbins, Bergman, Stagg and Coulter, (2012) Management 6th ed. Pearson Education 6) Gamble, Gilmore, McCartan-Quinn, Durkan (2011), The Marketing Concepts in the 21st Century: A Review of How Marketing Has Been defined Since the 1960’s, The Marketing Review, Vol. 11, no. 3