“The heart of your business success lies in its marketing. Most aspects of your business depend on successful marketing. The overall marketing umbrella covers advertising, public relations, promotions and sales. Marketing is a process by which a product or service is introduced and promoted to potential customers. Without marketing, your business may offer the best products or services in your industry, but none of your potential customers would know about it. Without marketing, sales may crash and companies may have to close.” [Hea13] The importance of customers, building strong customers relationships, understanding the customers and especially understanding their needs and that these needs can change is fundamental to good marketing practices and to the success of the business. The main goal of marketing is to attract new customers by giving them better value than other companies and to keep the customers that are already there by giving them satisfaction. Either for-profit companies (such as Google, Microsoft, and Mercedes Benz) or the non-profit companies (such as schools, hospitals, and colleges) use marketing, it is all around us. A simple five-step model of the marketing process includes: 1. Understanding the marketplace and customer needs and wants 2. Designing a customer-driven marketing strategy 3. Constructing an integrated marketing program that delivers superior value 4. Building profitable relationships and creating customer delight 5. Capturing value from customers to create profits and customer equity Marketing Strategy Once the company fully understands customers and the marketplace, they now must design marketing strategy, which shapes and re-shapes a company so that its business and products continue to meet corporate objectives, for example- profit and sales growth. Without a plan it’s really easy to get lost and ‘’get out of track’’. There is no time for big mistakes; if you want to be successful you have to have a plan so you know where you are going and where you want to be. The key planning questions that business must ask itself are: What customers will we market towards? How can we serve the customers right? Where are we now? How did we get there? Where are we heading? Where would we like to be? How do we get there? Are we on course? What makes us different? An important question for a company to ask at the beginning is what their target market is. It is important to carry out market segmentation to decide which customers they want to serve and their needs. A good marketing manager should know that it is impossible to serve all the customers in every way. But there are some managers that will try to serve all customers and sometimes by trying that, they may not serve any customers well at all. So most of the time, it is better to have fewer customers and serve them well and profitably than have many and not be able to serve them all well. Marketing Mi