Marketing

Marketing is pivotal in today's world. Used for determining and satisfying the needs of the customer, it stands at the interface between an organisation and its environment. Marketing provides customer and competitor information to the organisation, as well as creating awareness of the company's offering. As globalization creates increasing challenges to established marketing practices, marketing efforts need to reposition and adapt continuously to maintain an organisation's ability to reach potential customers.

This Very Short Introduction provides a general overview of the function and importance of marketing to modern organisations. Kenneth Le Meunier-FitzHugh discusses how marketing remains central to creating competitive advantage, and why it needs to be forward looking and constantly reinventing itself in line with new developments in the marketplace, such as the growth of social media, and the importance of ethics and responsible marketing. He shows how this has led to the role of marketing expanding beyond advertising and promotion, encompassing a broader sense of customer relationship management. He also considers how marketers need to remain able to manage the marketing mix in response to their understanding of customer's purchasing habits.

Kenneth Le Meunier-FitzHugh holds a PhD from the University of Warwick in Marketing and Strategic Management and is currently an Associate Professor in Marketing at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses on improving the interface between sales and marketing management, for which he has an international reputation. He has a number of publications in key academic journals, including the Journal of Business Research, Journal of Industrial Marketing Management, European Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management. His previous works include The Oxford Handbook of Strategic Sales and Sales Management (with David W. Cravens & Nigel F Piercy, OUP, 2011) Creating Effective Sales and Marketing Relationships (with Leslie Caroline Le Meunier-FitzHugh, Business Expert Press, 2015), and Achieving a Strategic Sales Focus: Contemporary Issues and Future Challenges (with Tony Douglas, OUP, 2016).