25 Need-to-Know MBA Models

Part two

Marketing

A useful definition of marketing is ‘seeing the world through the eyes of the customer’. Many companies suffer from an internal orientation, by focusing for example on the characteristics of the products they sell, rather than the actual needs of their customers. Marketers try to avoid this internal focus by taking the perspective of the customer in everything they do.

The field of marketing has been in existence for around 100 years, and several of the original ideas have stood the test of time. One is the so-called 4 Ps of marketing, which defines the key elements – product, place, price, promotion – that need to be taken into account when developing a marketing strategy. Another is the product life cycle – the notion that ...