Today is your first day in Downtown, Vancouver. You wake up at 10:00 a.m. and feel so hungry after spending your whole night to move in this place. As a result, you decide to buy your favorite food, pancakes as your breakfast and try to search the keyword “pancake breakfast downtown vancouver” on the internet. Unfortunately, you can find nothing related to the shops which are selling them (NO marketing!). You are disappointed and decide to find the shops yourself. Since all the shops look like the same, you cannot know what kinds of goods they are selling. You go in one by one but you can only find burger, sandwich or Chinese buns. Finally, you choose to give up and have a burger.

         This story seems ridiculous. However, it also reminds us marketing appears everywhere and it does affect our life every moment. Without marketing, you will never know where you can find the things (as simple as your breakfasts) you need. Then, you will need to spend so much time to search for the shops yourself.  Otherwise, you may choose to give up and get the things that may not be your first choice (burger in the example). Even worse, you may even don’t know that kinds of products are available to buy in the stores.

Just like a gun, marketing isa tool. You can use it to make our life easier, more convenient and satisfied or you can use it to deceive others. It depends on the users but not the tool. I think it is better for us to understand what marketing is by appreciating how do marketing satisfy our needs before making a judgment that marketing is creating illusions.

As a final year finance student, I used to think that marketing is something related to graphic designs, slogans and posters. After taking this course, I know how naive I am. Of course, marketing includes advertisement, but more important inside marketing is the strategic plan. One of the mains point of the plan is how can we satisfy the needs.

In order to understand the needs of customers, the first question is who will be our customers? It comes to the STP process. Firstly, we should divide the customers into different groups by looking at their behaviors, histories and wills. Secondly, we would find which group(s) is more favorable to us. Finally, we would customize our brands, products and advertisements in order to impress the targeted customers and fulfill their needs. However, how important is it? Let’s have an example.

As a student come from Hong Kong, I would like to express my view on the Disneyland and its competitor Ocean Park(Ocean Park Advertisement) in Hong Kong. As for the targeted customers, Disneyland should be targeting people who grew up with Disney Cartoons and want to have a more “realistic” contact with the characters. Ocean Park in the meantime should be targeting people who love sea animals. That’s the difference. As a multi-cultural place, Hong Kong people grew up with not only Disney, but also Japanese cartoons, Chinese cartoons, etc. The connection between Disney and Hong Kong people is much weaker than people in the western countries. However, what we love is in fact the ocean and also the marine life which can give us a sense of peace and freedom in such a busy and fast-pacing city. This is simple but enough to explain the success of Ocean Park and failure of Disneyland in Hong Kong.