Marketing.

Marketing is the process of studying wants and needs and satisfying those wants and needs by exchanging goods and services. This creates conditions to satisfy buyers and to bring profits for sellers.

Marketing has become a major focus of business in the 1980s and will continue to be.

A popular slogan that describes modern-day marketing is: “Find the need and fill it”. It means that business must do some market research to find out what goods and services people and organizations want and need.

The ultimate goal of marketing is to organize producing and selling goods and services.

To maintain some control over the marketing functions in a firm, many businesses have created the position called marketing manager. While developing programs to satisfy market wants and needs, marketing managers work with several variables, known as the marketing mix. Traditionally the important elements that make up marketing mix were defined as four “Ps”: product, price, promotion and place: what to sell, to whom, where and with what support.

Over the past 20 years other factors, which are equally important, appeared:

• People: the involvement of staff in marketing process, which will be crucial for most service based companies;

• Process: the way in which the service is provided;

• Physical environment in which the service is provided: light, smell, top models, images etc.

For companies operating in the service it is essential that both – employer and employee should have a clear and common idea about standard of the service they are striving to achieve.

People and organizations who market a product make decisions as to how, when and to whom it is to be sold: for example on its design, price and distribution. People and organizations making these decisions are marketers and work in marketing.

Vocabulary:

Wants and needs – бажання й потреби

Major focus of business – у центрі уваги в діловій сфері

Ultimate – кінцевий, основний

Variable – змінна (величина)

Involvement – притягнення, залучення

To strive – прагнути

Answer the questions:

1. What is marketing?

2. What is the popular slogan of modern-day marketing?

3. What new positions in firms appeared lately?

4. What is marketing mix?

5. What are other important factors in marketing mix?

6. What do people who market a product make?

7. How do we call them?

Types of economic systems.

Traditionally, economists have considered economic systems (in industrial countries, at least) in terms of the amount of state intervention in the operation of the economy. The two extremes are represented by the free market, where government intervention is minimal and the planned economy, where the state attempts to control all aspects of the economy.

The free market is characterized by limited government involvement in the allocation of resources. The market is allowed to regulate itself and move in whichever direction the preferences of consumers take it. In a free market, consumers express their needs and desires in the form of demand and this sends a signal to entrepreneurs to bring resources together and produce the good to satisfy the consumer demand. In return for this the entrepreneur receives a price, part of which is profit and the reward for IS or her part in the process, and the remainder is used to pay for the factors of production. For example, many companies have responded to a demand for environmentally friendly or green products, such as detergents.

The opposite extreme of the free market economy is the command economy, where a central planning authority, normally the state, exercises complete control over the allocation of resources. In this type of economy, satellite television would have been supplied by the state in response to what the state thought should have been supplied and the factors of production would have been combined in the production process by the state. This is the type of economic system, which had existed in Eastern Europe.

In reality, no economy exists in either the perfect free market or the perfect command system. Different societies have differing levels of state involvement in the economy. For example, in some Scandinavian countries the level of state involvement in the economy is more extensive than it is in Britain or the United States. It is worth remembering that the state's influence on business is not only economic, but is also political and legal.