There is a lot to marketing. A LOT. Most people think of marketing as just billboards and tv commercials like this: Old Spice Commercial. They think it’s all the promotions and advertisements. While this is certainly a big part of marketing, there is so much more to it. As Sofiya Pylypenko said in her blog post, “What Marketing Means to Most”, marketing is a sophisticated art and science. I’ve started a company that sells designer clothing, and pre-launch we spent over two months just doing market research into what people want, how we can deliver that to them, and what to do with our 4 P’s.

What should our product look like? What do people want from this product? How do we promote our product and get the name out there? How do we make a high-value name for ourselves? How do we communicate value to the customer? How much should we charge and which pricing strategy should we use? If we are going to have promotions, which ones? Do we pay for marketing? What kind?

These are just a few of the many, many questions we had to ask ourselves during the pre-launch phase. It took a lot of analysis, research, opinion polling, interviewing, market research surveys, sampling, and prototyping to finally get a line of products to launch with that we felt would best capture market demand, and provide value for the consumer. This process is going to have to be repeated on an on-going basis as we launch new products too. Marketing has become so much more to me than just promotions and advertisements. In encompasses almost everything about the product and method of selling.