What makes KINTEX be a successful exhibition center? - IAEE

1. Overview
II. Marketing as Strategy
Marketing’s traditional goal is to get closer to customers. So we usually think that marketing should make a role for
sustaining customers using 4Ps: product, price, place and promotion. The particular marketing variables under each P are
shown in Figure II-1. Marketing-mix decisions must be made for influencing the trade channels as well as final customers.
But in most cases, marketing is regarded as a critical expenditure. Once viewed as cost sink, marketing can not do a
prominent role in their organizations. In the Practice of Management, however, Peter Drucker wrote, “The business enterprise
has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are
costs.” 1 Nirmalya Kumar, a professor of marketing at London Business School, has been developed the marketing theory
as a corporate strategy for making marketing as a CEO’s top agenda. Actually Kumar introduces a framework for analyzing
and planning marketing strategy in terms of the “three Vs”: valued customer, value proposition, and value network. Kumar
proposes ways to deal with growing commoditization, price pressure, and the increasing market power of global mega
retailers. Also he strives to show how the marketing discipline could “become more strategic, cross-functional, and bottomline
oriented” than ever before.
Figure II-1. The Four P components of the Marketing Mix
Source: Philip Kotler, Marketing Management (Pearson Education, 2007)
1 Drucker Peter F. (1954) The Practice of Management. New York, Harper Collins