Can You Briefly Discuss The Marketing Functions?

There are eight universal functions performed in marketing:
• Buying: (Raw material to produce goods and services and to purchase finished goods or services as retailer or wholesaler to sell them again for final customers and consumers). It is a function that ensures that product offerings are available in sufficient quantities to meet customer demands.
• Selling: The function to be performed to sell the products/services/idea to satisfy customer needs or wants by using advertising, personal selling and sales promotion to match goods and services to customer needs.
• Transporting: Function related to create the availability of product or services. It is used for moving products from their points of production to location convenient for purchases
• Storing: Warehouses are used to store the products for further distribution.
• Standardizing and grading: To provide more quality products and services without variation in the quality. Ensuring that product offerings meet established and grading quality and quantity control standards of size, weight, and other product variables.
• Financing: Providing the financial resources to carry out different promotion of product and providing credit for channel members (wholesaler's retailers) or consumers.
• Risk taking: Marketer takes a risk specifically when any new product is introduced in a market because there are equal chances of success and failure. Dealing with uncertainty about consumer purchases resulting from creation and marketing of goods and services that consumers may purchase in the future.

Contract marketing concept and selling concept

The Marketing Function are:
1. Distribution
2. Product/Service Management
3. Pricing
4. Promotion
5. Selling
6. Financing
7. Marketing Information Management

1. Distribution
The distribution function handles activities involved in getting products from producers to customers.  Activities include:
-transporting goods
-storing goods
-finding sources for products
-making sure products get where they are needed on time
-transferring ownership of products.

2. Product/Service Management
This function focuses on developing products.

Examples include:
Developing a new product
Improving on an old product

As it related to retail, product management includes deciding which products to carry in a store.

3. Pricing
This function handles all activities involved in setting prices for products.
Activities include:
Financial information to determine price
Setting prices to cover costs and include reasonable profit.
Adjusting prices when conditions change.
4. Promotion
Refers to the non-personal communication with customers.  In this type of communication, the same message is conveyed to all customers. Types of non-personal communication includes:
-Advertising
-Public relations
-Sales promotion
-Visual merchandising

5. Selling
The selling function consists of personal communication with customers.

Activities include:
Helping customers in a store
Making sales presentations
Answering questions on the phone
Demonstrating how complex products work

6. Financing
Financing in marketing includes:
-Managing the money for marketing activities
-Gathering information on costs of marketing
-Preparing budgets

7. Marketing information management (MIM) is also known as Marketing Research.
MIM gathers, analyzes and distributes information about markets, competition, and customers.
This is one of the main ways that a business learns what customers want.
MIM activities might include developing surveys, analyzing the results of surveys and meeting with customers.