The process of marketing can be described as the activity, creation, communication, delivering, and exchanging the products that are used by customers. It may also be called a sales process management to identify and achieve customer interest and satisfaction. In modern era marketing has become a science and many institutions are conducting postgraduate level studies of this subject. The marketing of food products is a complicated process including many manufacturers and companies, and it provides the largest direct or indirect non-govt. employment in the United States. It consists of a chain of marketing activities between a food organization and the consumer such as food processing, wholesale, retail, transport, and food service. Food marketing system in various countries differs from each other based on the level of development of socio-economic, cultural, legal, political and finally the technological environment in those countries.
Components of Food Marketing; There are four components of marketing for food industry and all these starts from word P, so these are commonly called “four Ps.” These are product, price, promotion, and place and a perfect combination of these entire can add value to a food organization’s product.
- Product; the process of determining that a product will attract consumers or not requires three steps, and these are generating the ideas, screening the ideas for feasibility, and test the ideas for appeal. Based on the consumer’s choice a manufacturer can develop a new product or modify his existing products. Promotional procedures either by advertising or otherwise also play an important role to establish brand building of a particular food product to achieve an increase in quantity demand and price of the product, and a lot of money is being invested in it. Various attractive offers are also given at the time to time to induce people to buy that particular brand.
- Price; The manufacturer should decide the amount of a product with a clear idea in mind that retailer will add almost 50 percent to that price as his margin although the amount of the product must cover all the expenses of producing, packaging, storing and selling the product.
- Promotion; This component of the marketing mix may be described as the action used to propagate the features and qualities of a product in a way to persuade the consumer to prefer that product over other similar ones. Promotion may be out of the store, in store and on the packaging. Food ads on television are frequently used to convince the public in favor of that particular product and promotions in newspaper and magazines also play a vital role in this field, as coupons and other offers may be extended there.
- Place; This feature of marketing mix may refer to the distribution and storing mechanism necessary to move the product from the manufacturer to an outlet where the customer can buy it. It also has a reference to where the product is displayed in the retail outlet.
