What is The Marketing Idea?
Marketing is a fundamental element in any relationship between two beings. Every component of nature has a way of marketing itself. Hence, some people regard marketing as having begun with the earliest man and thus, the oldest profession in the world. For others, marketing began when man first engaged in exchange, that is when two parties with surpluses resorted to barter as an alternative to employing force, stealing or begging to obtain goods. Barter evolved into the art of selling or buying, which received high expression in very early civilizations.
Marketing is believed to have been invented in Japan, in about 1650 by the first member of the Mitsui family, who latter settled in Tokyo as a merchant. He opened what might be, called the first department store and adopted a strategy of buying for his customers, designing goods for them and developing production systems for those goods.
Most likely, marketing appeared in the West about the middle of nineteenth century, when Cyrus H. McCormick of the International Harvester Company invented a Mechanical harvester. While trying his products, he became the first person to see marketing as the unique central function of management. Fifty years later, W.E Kreusi of the University of Pennsylvania began to teach a course that he titled “The Marketing of Products”. Subsequently, American companies established marketing departments essentially to research into the selling process. In 1967, Philip Kotler published a book, titled Markerting Management. In this book Kotler codified ideas obtained from practical experience and this represents one of the earliest works on modern marketing. At present, the marketing idea is spreading into institutions which are not involved with the selling of tangible products, non-profit sectors such as colleges, hospitals, police departments, et cetera.
What is Agricultural Marketing?
Many definitions have been conceptualized for the concept and activities termed marketing. According to R.L. Cohls, Agricultural marketing has been define as the performance of all business activities involved in the flow of goods and services from the point of initial agricultural production until they are in the hands of the consumer. The same concept may also be seen as a broad term which includes all of the operations involved as a product moves from the first producer to the final consumer. Furthermore, marketing may be defined as the process of determining consumer demand for agricultural products and sellers motivating their sale and distributing them into ultimate consumption at profit.
In the first definition, business activities mentioned could be taken to mean to economic activities. The products should ostensibly be of agricultural origin although it might be more sensible to also look at the factor market from which agricultural inputs, some of which are not necessarily of agricultural origin, are bought. The economic activities are executed in stages during marketing. Economic activities should be those solely motivated by monetary returns. Such should exclude illegal and non-conventional activities such as stealing.
Sometimes, these business activities are conveniently divided into four:
(i) Micro activities
(ii) Macro activities
(iii) Producer activities
(iv) Consumer activities.
These sub-divisions are, however, conceptual rather than real and are used for analytical purposes.
Marketing involves creation of time, place, form and possession utilities.
- Time utility: is created when goods are moved from one time period to another through storage.
- Place utility: is created when in the course of marketing, goods are moved from one place to another through transportation.
- Form utility:is created when products are transformed through processing, from one form to another more acceptable form, such that the product becomes much more easily stored, transported prepared or becomes tastier.
- Possession Utility: is created when the title for a product changes. This implies that one derives some satisfaction from owning a particular product.
These four outcomes of the marketing process reveal the importance and show that marketing is productive.