Does Marketing create or satisfy demand?

In today’s age when you have a marketer for every conceivable and inconceivable need, should marketers aim only at SATISFYING needs? Marketing Guru Philip Kotler defines marketing as meeting needs profitably and says that it deals with identifying and meeting human and social needs. In the 21^st century when you have marketers selling you a piece of land on moon and even in the virtual world, (and YES people are buying!!!) should the definition of marketing be confined only to meeting and SATISFYING needs OR rather be expanded to one which CREATES demand and new markets for the company.

Let us try and understand this using example of the much hyped Apple iPod. Do people really need a portable digital music player? If you want music on the go there are the Walkmans and Discmans and if you thought chugging the cassettes and CD’s were a passé, you have your mobile phone which are MP3 capable and have expandable memory. Just when you thought that customers wanted an all in one mobile phone, you have Apple coming up with massive Ad campaign promoting their portable music player, the iPod. Did it sell??? Oh boy, Steve Jobs was laughing all his way to the bank.

This makes me think was Apple satisfying a latent need or was it creating a demand for its products? A research had indicated that people didn’t want to carry multiple devices for music, photography and calls. They wanted an all in one solution. If Apple was to go by this finding, iPod wouldn’t have seen the light of the day. So what made iPod sell? – A carefully executed marketing strategy by some of the best marketers in the world. The launch of the iPod was a true show of the marketing ingenuity of Apple – a revolutionary click wheel design made available in funky colours secured the iPod’s place in the ‘must haves’ list of everyone. They also provided a range of services along with the product like the podcasts and iTunes to make the ostensibly difficult task of synchronising the device with the PC a breeze. And Apple didn’t stop there, like all great brands with continuous product innovations iPod cut flab and then came the iPod Nano. Men, women and children everyone wanted to flaunt their iPods, iPod clones started showing up and Apple even started promoting it as the perfect corporate gift!!! A product which was thought to not have a market went on to be the top industry grosser. Of course iPod was lucky to have come from a company like Apple which is known for its innovation and futuristic designs. But one cannot ignore the fact that Apple was able to CREATE a market for iPods in a generation which was moving towards the unification of devices.

Leading management guru Peter Drucker once said: “There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him so well that it sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then is to make the product or service available.” At first I thought this was too idealistic to be true. But didn’t Apple create a product that fit so well for us (or rather they made it seems so!!!) that they literally CREATED a demand for their products. No wonder Steve Jobs has been dubiously credited of being able to talk his way to people’s wallet.

Probably it is time to rewrite the definition of marketing to make it more inclusive!!!

Posted by: Rocky Paul