What is Marketing?

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It is the start of a new academic year and I am preparing a marketing basics course for an incoming group of masters students. It is an intensive (4 day) pre-semester course intended as an introduction or review (depending on their background) to bring everyone up to level.

This brings to mind the question “What is marketing?”

When asked that question, many people will respond: “advertising” or “merchandising” or “analysis” or “phoning” or “selling” or something else. Those are components of the field of marketing – tools to achieve objectives. But they are not, in themselves, “marketing”.

Marketing is connecting the capabilities of your organization with the needs & wants of a selected group of customers – hopefully for mutual gain.

The components include:

• Understanding your organization — what it can do, what it is good at, and its objectives,

• Understanding the market — groups of potential customers, characteristics, needs and preferences, and the size of the market segments,

• Understanding competition — what they are capable of and good at, their objectives and strategies, and their positioning in the market,

• Designing the market strategy for your organization — company or other entity:

  • What markets you select to serve,

  • What value you will bring to your customers,

  • With what product — physical or service,

  • How you will position yourself in the market — your differentiation and why customers will chose you,

  • What objectives you seek to achieve,

  • How you chose to produce your product and deliver it to customers, and then

  • The marketing programs to achieve the objectives. This will include your use of the tools — product, price, promotion, and sales/distribution methods.

A number of years ago, Regis McKenna published his classic article “Marketing is Everything” (HBR, Jan-Feb 1991). In it, he concluded that marketing encompasses all the activities of a corporation (read entity) and is the job of everyone. Indeed it is.

But mostly, marketing is how to understand customers, connect the organization to customers, and bring value to both.

Are you adding and building value? Are you really marketing? Or, are you simply engaged in marketing tactics?

 

 

Mark Louis Uhrich

Maisons-Laffitte, France, 31 August 2010

©Copyright Mark Uhrich

 

Comments

[Véronique Ferrouillat]

I like tha clarity of this presentation on what marketing is. Marketing being so often hard to define, to understand and mostly to explain easily to new comers.. Well done for this well written article.
Thanks!