【正文】 needs/wants/problems and their alternatives now and in the future)* Competitor focus or customer orientation (., understanding the major petitors39。D and production staffs make sure that the objective quality of the pany39。s products (which can be goods, services, ideas, or bination of goods, services, and ideas) to the chosen customers. What marketing people do is to plan and execute the marketing plan, which consists of product strategy, pricing strategy, distribution strategy, and munication strategy. The execution of the marketing plan will create or facilitate the exchange or transaction between the target customers and the organization.Then we look into the definition of marketing by AMA in 2004. Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, municating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders. It is clear from the definition that marketing includes both marketing as a business function (an organizational function) and as a management philosophy/orientation (a set or crossfunctional or crossdepartmental processes for [a] creating, municating, and delivering value to the target customer and [b] to manage relationship with customers in ways that benefit the stakeholders). Marketing as a management philosophy requires an integrated effort of every members of the organization to provide superior value to the customer and to build, enhance, and maintain relationship with (profitable) target customers.When we look at the definition of marketing by AMA (2004), you can see that marketing, as a management philosophy, requires the integration of every function or department to work together to satisfy the target customers. The target customer is the focus of the pany39。D, logistics, marketing, and sales are examples of departments that normally exist in a business organization.What is marketing? Using American Marketing Association39。s mind through marketing mix strategy (the 4Ps). The brand image must reflect the most important benefit(s) that the target customers want. To position your brand in a target market, you first conduct positioning research to create a perceptual map of peting brands in the targetThe following note is provided by SamartWhat Is Marketing?STRATEGIC MARKETINGAs you may already know, the main objective of any business is to make profit. On the other hand, there are also nonprofit or notforprofit organizations that exist in the society. Their main objective is to achieve a nonprofit objective or to serve a certain cause, ., HK Red Cross wants to obtain enough blood to help the patients. These nonprofit organizations still need to make money or obtain money. But they do not do it for profit。 An essential tool for strategic benefit positioning is perceptual maps.Customer Needs and Perceptual Mapping: Method and ProceduresPerceptual maps represent the positions of products on a set of primary customer needs. Perceptual maps visually summarized the dimensions that customers use to perceive and judge products and identify how petitive products are placed on those dimensions. In practice, marketers need to know the number of dimensions, the names of those dimensions, what more detailed customer needs make up the dimensions, where petition is positioned, and where the ideal position for a new product or for repositioning is. A set of useful consumer behavior model has been developed to handle consumer attitudes toward various brands in a marketplace. Hauser and Urban (1977), in a newproduct setting, describe the processing of product attributes as pression into smaller number of aggregate dimensions called Aevaluation criteria. The central idea is that the brands in a market can be represented as a set of points in a multidimensional space. The axes of this space represent the perceived attributes that characterize the stimuli. Two main analytical approaches most frequently used to derive evaluation criteria and build perceptual maps are depositional methods, based on multidimensional scaling, and positional methods, based on factor analysis (Lilien and Kotler 1983). Each of these procedures is discussed in the following section.Multidimensional Scaling (MDS)Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a set of procedures in which a reduced space of product alternatives reflects perceived similarities and dissimilarities between products by the interproduct distances. mensional scaling to create perceptual maps: customers evaluate existing products according to their relative similarity and form an average proximity matrix whose entries represent the similarities or dissimilarities among the products for each group of customers you wish to analyze. multidimensional scaling to produce a map in 2, 3, ... dimensions. on managerial judgments, limitations owing to the number of stimuli, and a plot of Astress select the appropriate number of dimensions.4. Name the dimensions based on the relative position of the stimuli or a regression of the map coordinates on attribute ratings.Multidimensional scaling is a powerful technique, but it must be used with caution. Several issues need to be considered. The first issue is concerned with the number of stimuli (., products) needed. Klabir (1969) shows that at least eight products are needed to create a good twodimensional map. Green and Wind (1973) suggest that the number of dimensions should be less than onethird of the number of products. The second issue is concerned with the naming of the dimensions. The analyst generally names the dimensions by using knowledge of the product category to explain best the products= positions. This procedure is arbitrary and involves a high degree of creativity. The final issue is concerned wit