Customer decides as to what products suits their needs. Education, media, etc has changed the type of goods required by customers. Especially in the last decade there is total shift of goods required by the customers. Mobile repairing centers, day care centers computer centers, which had no place are very important now a days. Marketing affects our livers in many ways. The product satisfy customer needs and wants and also remove hindrances between the marketers and customers by creating utilities for them by adding value to the product. By removing these hindrances, marketing ensures free and smooth exchange of goods and services from marketers to customers. These utilities are as follows.
• Form Utility - Form utility converts the raw form of products into meaningful final products. Thus, customers force marketers to direct production department in terms of specific customer needs satisfaction.
• Person Utility - Person Utility fills the gap between the producers and the ultimate customer. Marketing helps to remove the hindrance of person by means of trade. Trade, as a part of marketing, plays a major role in establishing contact between producers as providers of goods and services and customers as users or consumers of those goods and services to satisfy their needs. Various traders, namely, wholesaler, retailer, and mercantile agents operate to provide person utility.
• Exchange Utility - Marketing helps to bring together the producers of goods ready to sell their goods for money and the consumers of those goods ready to part with their money (purchasing power), thus removing the hindrance of exchange. Moreover, with money as the medium of exchange, payment for goods and services is made through banks. In this way, banks help to remove the hindrance of exchange and enable the buyers to procure goods on credit. Further, bank often finance trade in ways more than one. Thus exchange utility is provided by money, banking, and finance.
• Place Utility - Place utility brings the producer of goods and services closer to the customer. Goods may be produced at one place where advantages of location in market may be available whereas the buyers of such goods may be situated at a far off place. The barrier of distance between the place of production and the market where these products can be sold is removed by different means of transport. Besides transporting goods from the place of production to that of consumption, the services of insurance to cover the risk of loss during transit and storage and packaging to protect goods against damage and pilferage are also aimed at removing hindrance of place.
• Time Utility - Goods are normally produced in anticipation of demand and as such they are to be stored as long as the demand for the same comes up. Such stored goods are to be released as and when demand materializes. This function of storage and preservation is performed by warehouses which remove the hindrance of time by balancing the time gap between production and consumption, thus creating time utility. During this process of storage, insurance plays its role by removing the risk of loss or damage through left or fire.
• Knowledge Utility - Advertising and salesmanship help to remove the hindrance or lack of knowledge on the part of the prospective buyers by bringing to the notice of the customer the utility of buying the goods and services offered. A producer may find it difficult to sell his products unless and until he brings it to the knowledge of the prospective consumers the utility and the distinctive features of his products.
