Marketing remains a critical strategic element for any business, but understanding its scope is crucial.
The seven functions of marketing extend beyond mere promotion—they form the foundation for a sustainable and successful marketing strategy. In 2024, the integration of AI has revolutionised these functions, enhancing efficiency, personalisation, and data-driven decision-making, ensuring businesses stay competitive in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Financing
Marketing is a revenue-growing function. That means successful marketing delivers a return on investment (ROI) that exceeds initial funding. That ROI comes in many forms, from campaigns that deliver immediate up-swing in sales to the sustainable marketing communications that nurture your core business. It’s important to understand, however, that the ROI on avenues of marketing can also vary substantially.
Successful marketing is about assessing where your financing can deliver the most efficient returns. Take Facebook campaigns as an example, a clear area where metrics for your financing can be tracked and understood. In driving a promotional campaign for fashion brand Straits Emporium, Content Nation was able to deliver a total reach of almost half a million audience members, generating 33,000 clicks at a cost of just RM0.23 per click. Compare that to the bonkers US$7 million for a 30-second Superbowl advert, and you begin to understand the complexity of this function.
Information management
Great marketing is informed marketing. What marketing does is provide the foundation for understanding your audience and the wider market in which you operate. In real terms this is everything from speaking to sales teams to get a personal view of the customer to assessing and analysing increasingly detailed social media and digital demographics. It’s not just about knowing who they are though, it’s about understanding what they want. That means what they want from your product, and how they prefer for you to communicate with them as a brand.
Customer surveys have traditionally been a good way of gathering this data, but with the increasing power of digital insight, brands have access to even greater information than ever before. In 2024, Netflix’s AI-driven recommendation system was critical in driving user engagement and satisfaction. This system—responsible for about 80% of the content viewed on the platform—uses machine learning algorithms to analyse viewing patterns, preferences, and behaviours. The personalised approach has saved Netflix approximately US$1 billion annually through customer retention and reduced churn rates.
Pricing
Marketing works closely with other strategic functions to analyse and understand a pricing model that works for your business. It’s not just about market research to understand what the competition has to offer, it’s also about understanding the perceived value of your brand and product. Good information management helps feed into this function.
If you want to understand how pricing goes beyond simple production cost, take a look at arguably one of the most reputable brands in the world—Apple. In 2024, Apple continues to use a premium pricing strategy, launching products at high prices and gradually lowering them. This approach captures early adopters and maximises profits before making products more accessible. For example, iPhone prices range from US$429 for older models to US$1,599 for the latest versions. This strategy helps Apple maintain a strong position in the premium smartphone market while maintaining an aura of aspirational exclusivity.
Product and service management
Product and service management is about focusing on delivering the products or services that your customers want. That means designing new product lines or service offerings that utilise audience insight to steer the development process. This process isn’t limited to just creating new iterations of an offering for your existing audience, but also includes the expansion into new markets and audiences.
You can find a great example of this process with one of Content Nation’s clients, Disney Plus+. The brand promoted the official launch of local product Disney+ Hotstar in Malaysia by using the concept of key opinion leaders and influencers transforming into characters after binge-watching the streaming platform. We collaborated with 11 key opinion leaders, alongside a mix of micro and macro influencers, to ensure broad coverage and maximum reach. Their influential platforms and engaging content effectively communicated that Disney+ Hotstar is now available in Malaysia. The campaign reached 795,751 individuals, achieving an impressive cost per view (CPV) of US$0.04, demonstrating its success in capturing audience attention and engagement.
Promotion
Now we’re entering the heartland of marketing, with the all-important focus on promotion. Promotion isn’t just about pushing a particular product or service, it’s increasingly about celebrating and amplifying the story of the brand itself. In real terms this means everything from content marketing, influencer marketing, promotional events, celebrity sponsorships, digital marketing and social media marketing, and all the magic in between.
A great example is the success of the promotional campaign for Grand Theft Auto 6. In purely social media terms the promoters managed to achieve over 19 million views within two weeks. The campaign’s success was driven by its cinematic graphics and cultural relevance that leveraged the iconic nature of the game and its reputation, significantly boosting anticipation and engagement among fans. From a wider perspective, the campaign managed to create significantly increased brand recognition that could unlock future promotional benefits.
Selling
It’s all well and good telling people about your product, but you need to get the selling done too. While a sales team or e-commerce platform might be the ultimate processor of the transaction, it’s up to marketing to nurture the audience interest and then convert that interest into a result. In modern marketing terms that means attracting an audience, converting their interest into a lead, and closing and closing a sale. If your marketing team isn’t selling, it’s not doing its job.
So how does marketing ‘sell’? Let’s take an excellent example—leveraging user-generated content (UGC) as a social strategy to boost brand awareness. Studies show 75% of people find UGC makes brands more authentic, and 90% say it influences their decisions more than search results. Apple’s #ShotOniPhone campaign, using both online and offline tactics, has seen the hashtag used over 16 million times on Instagram, providing massive exposure without direct costs. This innovative approach effectively showcases the product’s capabilities and drives sales by leveraging user-generated content and authentic customer experiences.
Distribution
The McDonald’s tragic tale of failing Ayam Goreng supplies actually leads to our final element of marketing functionality—distribution. With your market insight and customer understanding, marketing is a crucial part of a brand’s distribution planning. If you’re about to run a big marketing campaign, you need to make sure that you’re working with your supply chain peers to ensure that you’ve got the inventory to back up the hype. Likewise, if you’re a fireworks supplier, you better be stockpiling and ready for the rush in good time for Chinese New Year.
It’s fair to say McDonald’s marketing department had no idea of how popular their 2017 viral Ayam Goreng product campaign would be, but had they worked closely with the procurement department at McDonald’s to ensure that they were ready to react to a potential surge in demand? It certainly didn’t seem so, given widespread lack of supplies across the country causing angry netizens to lash out in chicken-based fury. That’s why distribution is another essential consideration in the functions of marketing. Understanding what marketing does in the context of distribution planning can help prevent such mishaps.
If you’re looking to enhance your marketing strategy and leverage the full potential of the 7 functions of marketing, Content Nation is here to help. Reach out to us today for expert guidance and tailored solutions to drive your business success.
