In a modern society, the importance of marketing can hardly be over-emphasized. In the affluent societies, marketing is regarded as the delivery of the standard of living. The development of large-scale production depends upon the ever expanding markets. To cure the problems of unemployment and overpopulation the balanced growth of both industry and agriculture is vitally important. The balanced growth is largely dependent upon the quick inter-sectoral transfer of resources. Since marketing can quicken the process of distribution of resources from one sector to the other, it helps the balanced growth of both agriculture and industry.
Marketing is very much useful to all sections of people in a society. People in the same locality trade with one another; because by specializing in their work they can produce more. The trade increases their well-being and dependence upon a well-operated market. It also develops interdependence. The people depend upon markets to bring them a constant flow of goods for consumption and they also depend upon markets to take what they produce in exchange for what they consume.
We know that areas differ widely in their resources. For example, Chittagong Hills and Sylhet in Bangladesh can grow tea more. Barisal and Noakhali in Bangladesh have soil and climate suitable to grow more coconuts. On the other hand, neither Sylhet nor Hill Tracts is suited to produce coconut and Barisal or Noakhali cannot produce tea. Trade based on differences in natural resources has gone for thousands of years even among primitive peoples. Importance Of Marketing In Modern Society can be approximated in the following heads:
Importance Of Marketing In Modern Society
(1) Personal Consumption Expenditures: The personal consumption expenditures are the end result of marketing efforts. Such expenditures represent the level of living of the people in a society in any given year. Since they mark the end result of all economic effort including that of marketing, they are aptly regarded as the appropriate measure of the magnitude of the marketing task. The personal consumption expenditures represent the value of goods and services currently delivered by the nation’s economy to its people for its use and absorption. Thus, these expenditures, when totaled, aid in determining the nature and significance of marketing task.
(2) Volume of Trade Transacted: The value of goods marketed by organized producers in agricultural or extractive industries, by manufacturers and by importers is first determined to ascertain the total volume of trade transacted. To this must be added the sales of wholesale establishments and retail stores and sales and other receipts of personal, business and repair service establishments.
(3) Value of the Marketing Structure: Another way of gauging the importance of marketing is to ascertain the character of the institutional structure which has evolved to perform the marketing functions that are necessary to support this volume of trade.
(4) Employment in the Marketing Structure: The number of people employed in marketing is another criterion for the measurement of the significance of marketing. It is, of course, difficult to determine the exact number of people engaged in the marketing process. Because many people engaged in the agriculture, manufacturing and extractive industries are also engaged in marketing functions. But it is easy to realize that marketing enables many to earn their livelihood. This is important to reduce the intensity of unemployment problem in the country.
(5) Value Added By Marketing: The most meaningful manner of judging the importance of marketing in our economy is by measuring the value that is added to goods by the performance of marketing functions. The process of “value added” by marketing takes place in the following ways:
A factory buys raw materials and fuel for $10 and fabricates the materials into a finished product which it sells for $ 15. The difference ($ 5) is known as the “value added” in the manufacturing process.
The wholesaler buys the article for $ 15 and sells it to the retailer for $ 20 and the retailer sells it to the consumer for $ 25. The difference between $ 15 paid to the manufacturer and $ 25 received from the consumer (i.e. $ 10) is the value added by the wholesaler and the retailer.
