Changing pages from strategy, let’s begin to look at the function of marketing within business. Now in this section, Professor Hartley is going to take you through some of the primary or dominant topics that you need to understand to have a base understanding of, well first, what is marketing and then the task of marketers, that is, what do marketers actually do.

We’ll visit a little bit of the market analysis process to give you information on how we come up with. understanding of the market out there, how we segment the various parts of the market, and how we choose the parts of the market that we are going to target with our products or services. From there, we’ll look at market research and the processes for extracting information on about your consumers about the marketplace to help understand what marketing strategy you’re going to pursue.

Now the marketing strategy is generally referred to as the marketing mix these are the four p’s or five p’s or seven p’s however many p’s go in there these are acronyms that represent the various elements of marketing strategy. And finally we look at consumer behavior so that we get a better idea of how our strategy and our research aligns with how consumers or customers actually act out there in the marketplace.

So with that being said, Professor Hartley is going to take you through these topics but if you want a more detailed understanding of these topics please take a look at our marketing course. Okay.