What does the role of Marketing involve?

Marketing is used to identify the customer, satisfy the customer, and keep the customer. It is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

Product marketing deals with the first of the "7P"'s of marketing, which are Product, Pricing, Place, and Promotion, Packaging, Positioning & People.

Market research is any organized effort to gather information about markets or customers.

Market trends are the upward or downward movement of a market, during a period of time. The market size is more difficult to estimate if one is starting with something completely new. In this case, you will have to derive the figures from the number of potential customers, or customer segments.

Through Market information one can know the prices of the different commodities in the market, as well as the supply and demand situation. Information about the markets can be obtained from different sources, varieties and formats, as well as the sources and varieties that have to be obtained to make the business work.

Marketing research, as a sub-set aspect of marketing activities, can be divided into the following parts:

• Primary research (also known as field research), which involves the conduction and compilation of research for a specific purpose.
• Secondary research (also referred to as desk research), initially conducted for one purpose, but often used to support another purpose or end goal.

There also exist additional modes of marketing research, which are:

• Exploratory research, pertaining to research that investigates an assumption.
• Descriptive research, which, as the term suggests, describes "what is".
• Predictive research, meaning research conducted to predict a future occurrence.
• Conclusive research, for the purpose of deriving a conclusion via a research process.

Promotion is one of the four elements of marketing mix (product, price, promotion, distribution). It's the communication link between sellers and buyers for the purpose of influening,informing or persuading a potential buyer's purchasing decision.

Besides information about the target market, one also needs information about one's competitors, customers, products, etc. Lastly, you need to measure marketing effectiveness. A few techniques are:

• Customer analysis
• Choice Modelling
• Competitor Analysis
• Risk analysis
• Product research
• Advertising the research
• Marketing mix modeling
• Market information

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing)