Before taking Comm 296, my understanding of the word ”marketing” was like a group of people sitting in a meeting room and designing a big, colorful poster of one of their new products —- Now, I know it is just part of advertising instead of the whole term of marketing.

Today, I think marketing is more likely a plan of the company’s future. Every single company, big or small, lives on a certain market or markets. Good businesses see a step ahead, and this is implemented, from my view, by marketing. A current profitable product does not mean the company could relay on it for a long time. Sometimes it’s even deceptive. I got my own experience of the farmers in my hometown. They used to grow rice in a small scare. In 2010, the economic was recovering from the 2009 depression, so the price of rice start to grow up as well. The farmers saw it as a solid trend that rice could continue to be profitable for them. Everyone start to grow rice. They reclaimed the citrus land, the soybeans grand, to grow rice. In 2011, due to the impact of import rice to the market. Their rice was unsalable and the farmers suffer a serious lost.

If they could imply some marketing knowledge and research on the market trend, such suffer might be avoidable. The marketing plan is broken down into various components—what product should be invested on (in this case, the most important one), how much it should cost, where and how it will be promoted, and how it will get to the consumer.

After all, I do leaned some useful, proactive aspects in this course. And thank Ms. Tamar for her professional presentations.