Definition of Marketing

Defining Marketing

What Is Marketing?

Marketing is about identifying and meeting human and social needs. One of the shortest good definitions of marketing is “meeting needs profitably.”

The American Marketing Association offers the following formal definition:

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

We can distinguish between a social and a managerial definition of marketing. A social definition shows the role marketing plays in society; for example, one marketer has said that marketing’s role is to “deliver a higher standard of living.” Here is a social definition that serves our purpose:

Marketing is a societal process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering, and freely exchanging products and services of value with others.

Many people sometimes think of marketing as “the art of selling products,” but they are surprised when they hear that selling is not the most important part of marketing! Selling is only the tip of the marketing iceberg.

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then is to make the product or service available.

The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. No doubt, there would always be some need for selling to take place, but good marketing strategy when effectively done would have sold the products in the minds of the target consumer, even before selling takes place.

The key ideas in the definition of marketing are:

1.    Marketing could be an activity or a process,

2.    It could create, communicate, deliver, or exchange products, services or ideas;

3.    The recipients of the marketing activity or process could be consumers or the society at large.

For example marketing can be utilized for products such as soft drinks i.e. coca cola or noodles; it can be used to offer services such as banking or insurance; it can also be used for ideas such as “family planning”.

Thus we talk about product marketing, service marketing, political marketing i.e. promoting political parties or candidates, and social marketing for promoting social ideas like family planning.

                                                                                                     

Reference

Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller.  (2012). Marketing Management (14^th Edition). New York: Prentice Hall.