Marketing Essentials: A Comprehensive Guide to Marketing Principles and Practices

MARKETING ESSENTIALS
1

Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
LO1 Explain the key roles and responsibilities of the marketing function.....................................4
LO2 Compare ways in which organisations use elements of the marketing mix (7Ps) to achieve
overall business objectives..............................................................................................................8
LO3 Develop and evaluate a basic marketing plan.......................................................................10
Conclusion:....................................................................................................................................13
Reference List:...............................................................................................................................14
2

Introduction
In this study, the researcher will discuss the importance marketing in an organization. Marketing
is one of the main pillars of any organization. The ultimate goal of any organization is to deliver
their products and services to its target customers and it is the responsibility of the marketing
department to make it happen. The researcher will also explain the interrelation between
marketing and other departments of the organization and the way they function in coordination to
achieve the objective of the organization. However, the procedure and philosophy of marketing
department varies in every organization. In order to understand the functionality of different
organization the researcher will provide a comparative study of the chosen organization and
another organization from the same sector.
Definition: Marketing is the process followed by any organization to sell, promote and distribute
their products or services to target customer to earn profit and maintain good relation with
customers (Tomczak et al., 2018).
In order to explain various aspects of marketing and marketing manager, the researcher will take
Aldi as the case study and discuss the functions of their marketing department
Aldi: Aldi is a multinational retail chain headquartered in Germany. It was founded by the
Albrecht brothers karl and Theo in 1946, after they took over their mother’s small departmental
store in Essen Germany. Aldi is renowned to be the first discounter of the world. However, the
company split in 1960 and known as Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud (Aldi.com. (2018)). Currently Aldi
has more than 10,000 stores in 20 countries around the globe including Germany, Britain, USA,
China and Australia among others. Aldi has 1600 stores only in USA as reported in 2017. Aldi
opened its first international store in Austria, after acquiring the grocery chain Hofer.
Aldi Nord operates in Belgium, Luxembourg, Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Spain
and Portugal, and also operates in the United States. Aldi Süd is operational in the United States,
Ireland, Austria, Slovenia and Italy (as Hofer), Australia, Great Britain and Switzerland.
Together Aldi reported to having turnover of $50 billion. Number of employees of Aldi Nord
and Aldi Sud are 104400 and 58179 respectively as on 2015. Aldi follows the top-down
organization structure. As for organizational culture Aldi follows Charles Handy’s Power
3

culture, where the decision making power remains in the hand of a group of people and they
delegate work to the other employees.
LO1 Explain the key roles and responsibilities of the marketing function.
P1 Explain the key roles and responsibilities of the marketing function for the chosen
organization (M1)
In this section, the researcher has discussed the various roles and responsibilities of marketing
function. It is the common thread between the customers and organization. The department
gathers feedback from its customers and conveys it to the company for providing products and
services according to the needs and requirement of the customers (Armstrong et al., 2015). The
various roles and responsibilities have been described in the below picture.
Figure 1-Functions of marketing
(Source- Zwart et al., 2016)
4