1. People’s attitudes to brands and marketing are very different. Which of these statements do you think is true and which is false? Provide your comments.

1. We are being largely manipulated into buying brands, not just products.

2. Companies are switching from showcasing product features to marketing aspirations and the dream of a more exciting life.

3. Today consumers are becoming more and more cynical, and for them ‘shooting down adv ertising’ (різко критикувати) has become a kind of sport.

4. It is a more difficult task to describe the features and benefits of the product than to develop a brand.

2. Discuss the following

• In your opinion, is marketing just mere selling goods?

• Is marketing important in modern economy? Why?

Text a Marketing

Marketing is the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers. Marketing can sometimes be interpreted as the art of selling products, but selling is only a small fraction of marketing.

Marketing can be looked at as an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, delivering and communicating value to customers, and managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its shareholders. Marketing management is the art of choosing target markets, as well as acquiring and keeping customers through providing superior customer value.

Recent approaches in marketing include: relationship marketing with focus on the customer, business marketing or industrial marketing with focus on an organization or institution and social marketing with focus on benefits to society.

Relationship marketing is first of all building and keeping good customer relations . Emphasis is placed on the whole relationship between suppliers and customers. The aim is to provide the best possible customer service and build customer loyalty.

Business or industrial marketing is building and keeping relationships between organizations. In this context, marketing takes place between businesses or organizations. The product focus lies on industrial goods or capital goods rather than consumer products or end products. Different forms of marketing activities, such as promotion, advertising and communication to the customer are used.

Social marketing first of all focuses on benefit to society. It has similar characteristics to industrial marketing orientation but with the added condition that there will be a curtailment of any harmful activities to society, in either product, production, or selling methods.

New forms of marketing also use the internet and are therefore called internet marketing or more generally e-marketing, online marketing, search engine marketing, desktop advertising or affiliate marketing. Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through optimization (both on-page and off-page) as well as through advertising. Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. It attempts to perfect the segmentation strategy used in traditional marketing. These target their audience more precisely, and are sometimes called personalized marketing or one-to-one marketing. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to be broad in scope, because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media.

Brand value or “branding” is the main company philosophy and marketing is considered to be an instrument of branding philosophy, that is the application of marketing techniques to a specific product, product line, or brand.