Marketing management

Marketing is all about exchange! More precisely, marketing refers to all the processes implemented by an organization to understand, influence in the direction of its objectives, and control the conditions of exchange between itself and other entities: individuals, groups or organizations. Marketing management is therefore the action, the art, the way of conducting the organization's exchanges with its markets, directing, planning and controlling them. In this sense, marketing management can be understood as the technology of organizational exchange, including the creation and sale of goods of value to customers.

In order to define the scope of marketing, it should be noted that exchanges with the company's owners, with various publics, or even with employees, are not its chosen domain, even if finance, management control or human resources management, for example, sometimes borrow certain techniques and methods from it. Marketing management takes these into account, but is primarily concerned with the vital exchanges between the company and its customers, without whom no organization could exist. His mission is to create value in their eyes, a value that will encourage acquisition, a "customer value" that complements that of any technological advances in the strict sense of the term. To achieve this, they must work in close cooperation with all the company's other functions.

Many authors place the emergence of marketing in the period when the supply of goods and services began to exceed demand, and sales performance came to depend not just on changes in sales techniques and methods, but on a genuine conceptual redefinition of sales itself, and the emergence of a methodology. As competition became fiercer, firms sought competitive advantage by focusing on demand, and the idea that it is by studying the market that an offer adapted to customer desires can be conceived, developed, propagated and formalized in the business world. Today, marketing can no longer be reduced to a set of techniques and methods. It is based on a theoretical framework, and if the discipline has become more specialized, or even sophisticated, depending on the application (international, political, industrial, service marketing...), the fundamental approach remains the same. It is based on the logic of seducing and satisfying customers by creating, making available and possibly transferring value that they are inclined to acquire.

Marketing management contributes to the formulation of corporate strategy, and acts in coherence with it. This articulation depends on the definition of the company's value proposition, market segmentation, targeting choices and the possibility of positioning the offering. All these elements form the methodological core of marketing management....