Ch. 1 - Overview of Marketing (Brief History and Mission Statement)

Mission statement 

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world. It is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPod.

    

History of Apple

Apple was established on April 1^st, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne to sell the Apple I personal computer kit. It is an American corporation that designs and manufactures computer hardware, software and other consumer electronics. The company is best known for their Macintosh personal computer line, Mac OS X, extremely loyal user-base, iTunes media application and the iPod personal music player. The company headquarters is in Cupertino, California, CEO and co-founder is Steve Jobs and the company boasts 284 retail locations spanning 10 different countries.

What is marketing?

Marketing is the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. Marketing actions and strategies result in making products accessible that satisfy customers while making profits for the companies that present those products.

According to the book MKTG 5, 2012 Student Edition, 5th Edition, chapter 1; the marketing definition is “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” The book also discusses the exchange of products and the conditions for exchanging. Furthermore it states that The Four Marketing Management, Philosophies; which includes production orientation, sales orientation, market orientation, and societal orientation.

Before acknowledging the correct definition of marketing, I assumed marketing was only involved with advertising. But now I found out that it is all to do with assessing the wants and satisfaction of customers, Design and managing product offerings, determining prices and pricing policies, developing distribution strategies, and communicate with present and potential customers. After reading MKTG 5, 2012 Student Edition, 5th Edition, chapter 1 I found out that, marketing is all processes from creation of a good to consumption of that good by consumers. Without marketing, consumers would not get goods or receive them in lower quality at a maximum price. Marketing is what makes companies work proficiently. Without marketing, few companies would expand or even continue operating.

The MKTG book also explains the difference between Sales Orientations and Market Orientations. Basically a sales Orientation is when business will focus much more of its energy on selling. Also according to the MKTG book, a sales orientation is how successfully a business can use the sales techniques to gain maximum profit. The examples of sales techniques will include; discounts, buy-one-get-one-free promotions, free website banners when a customer buys a print ad or other means of 
stimulating sales. On the other hand market orientation means a business 
tactic or philosophy that focuses on recognizing and meeting the specified 
or unseen needs or wants of customers.

As a customer I would prefer businesses to emphasis on market orientation.
Because I desire a product that hasa good quality, for example I selected 
the company Apple Inc, since it’s been providing me products that  has 
an excellent quality and meets all my needs with iPhone 4 or any other gadgets.