Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying consumer requirements profitably. It is the activity concerned with the satisfaction of needs and wants through exchange processes.
Marketing involves all efforts geared towards the identification and assessment of human needs, finding or developing the appropriate products to meet the needs, and getting people to adopt that product through the exchange process, for the satisfaction of the needs. The satisfaction of needs is the major goal of marketing. The exchange process is the means of attaining it. For exchange to take place, there must be two parties, each with something of value to give to the other. The modern approach to the definition of marketing makes it applicable to both commercial or profit making organisation as well as non commercial ones, such as political, charity, religious and governmental institutions.
For marketing to discharge its role in any community, certain functions must be performed. This includes : buying, selling, transportation, storage, grading, standardization, information and research. These basic functions are carried out by marketing anyway. However, the rate and manner in which marketing functions are performed are affected by certain environmental forces, with which marketing occasionally contends, or adapt to most of the times.
This environmental forces includes the prevailing political setup, laws of the land, general economic situation, culture, technology, religion and demography among others. These provide both opportunities and threats. There are dynamic and different from place to place and from time to time. Marketing activities have to be carried out within the prevailing environment. Marketing practice is therefore to a large extent dictated by the environment common and difference from place to place, even though the functions to be performed are universally the same. There exist, Japanese marketing, american marketing, British marketing, social estate marketing and Nigerian marketing among others.
Marketing in Nigeria is all about practice of marketing as detected or affected by the prevailing Nigerian environment. It will embrace Nigerian's economic history, political and legal forces, nature of competition, general economy, demography as well as other peculiar forces which in pink on the practice of commerce and marketing in the country.
In order to be able to successfully practice marketing in Nigeria, one needs to be acquainted with the peculiarities of government and business in the country, in addition to the principles and processes of marketing as a universal discipline.
