The first thing you need to know about marketing is that you don't sell the product but you sell the value. What does that mean?

If you sell cars, for example, the customer does not buy the engine, body, tires and other components of the car, but rather the value, which may be:

Luxury.

Driving pleasure and maneuverability strain.

Safety.

Right price.

Family comfort.

Elegance of taste.

Speed or outstanding technique.

These are the actual items that the buyer sees that can prompt him to offer money for that value. Marketing is trying to know what is going on in the customer's head, then focusing on it and convincing him that this value meets his needs. For example, there are those who consider safety in cars the highest value, and therefore the role of the marketer is summarized in a few steps: finding the buyer, knowing his desires accurately, then convincing him that the product gives him the value he is looking for, and finally convincing him to buy. In practice, these steps are called advertising, marketing research, pricing, marketing strategy, and finally customer service and sales.

Sometimes the boundaries between marketing, sales, and customer service fade, and sometimes they appear. There are several reasons for this, including, for example, the development in management theories, and also the size of the company and its need to separate or merge those processes, as well as the business that targets other businesses "business to business" differs in structure from companies that target individuals "business to consumer", and that because of the different nature of customers and their way of thinking.

One of the most important processes of marketing management is research, and it begins with dividing customers according to their relationship with the product and their way of thinking, then comes an attempt to know the desires of each of those groups, and then starts promoting them through the most effective and influential channels. For example, employees listen to the radio on the way to and back from work, at the beginning and end of the day, while the elderly for example, tend to newspapers, and so on.

There are several tools used in planning, strategic and marketing, for example "analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats", as well as "analysis of Porter's five forces", which are accessibility elements and threats to alternative products, suppliers, customers and competitors. We will may discuss these strategies in a later article.

Of course there are a lot of marketing details that each can fill several volumes and so we will not be able to widen the talk about it here, including, but not limited to, advertising, as well as there is the brand topic, customer loyalty and promotional campaigns.

In the end it remains to be remembered that marketing science is the most important business activity of all, it is the source of money and therefore must take its right of attention no matter how small or large the company is.