There has never been any dispute about the pivotal role marketing plays in business and economic development of a society and it is a truism that without marketing we would not today be enjoying the standard of living that we take for granted , marketing is business .
Interestingly , any word that is in regular common usage has a tendency of conveying different meaning to different groups and can even morph into a meaning that may sometimes not have a universal understanding even though all are using the same word .
An example of such a word is love which everyone understands and uses but surely the love of a spouse , a mother , a sibling , a pet , a flower , an art object , a book , a colleague , a language , a country or God cannot have the same meaning even though the word of expression is the same .
Marketing is such a word and many people use the word to convey essentially different aspects of the wide spectrum the word marketing covers but they may not necessarily be talking about a precise meaning that they might think they are .
It is another truism that every business , whether for profit or not has a marketing function in the enterprise irrespective by what name you call it , if you do not have something to market then you do not have a business , period .
The confusion in defining marketing arises from the fact that marketing is derived from the word market and we all have a mental image of what a market is , usually in this part of the world it is an agricultural produce market with women haggling or a live animal market and in this case with men .
We do however know that the word market has evolved to encompass more than a regular gathering of people with a sole purpose of purchasing and selling provisions , livestock and other commodities in a restricted geographical location .
For the purpose of this discussion we will define a market from a simple economics definition that defines a market as the sum total of all buyers and sellers in a specific area which may be global , contained in a country , or regions , states , cities , towns , villages or simply person to person .
The value , cost and price of the items or services traded in the defined area is the market and the trade is governed by the forces of supply and demand . It is the interplay of demand and supply that determines the price of goods and services .
Things would have been comparatively simpler if from a linguistic point of view we had simply called those that operated in the just defined markets as marketers but language chose to call them traders to really signify that something was being exchanged by trading .
As the markets evolved and became more sophisticated a new profession started emerging as third parties , meaning not the physical owners of the goods and services being traded , started to control , influence , and determine the commercial activities undertaken .
Specialist businesses started to emerge called trading houses which were able to take advantage of economies of scale and smooth out seasonal fluctuations of commodities by setting up storage facilities to stabilize supply to meet the demand that would otherwise wane periodically .
Marketing was born and from the start its role was essentially as a catalyst that helped the commercial activity grow and flourish . Marketing has traditionally been associated and involved in the demand creation side of the commercial equation .
We are however back at the conundrum of what marketing is and in order to really understand what the term means we posed the question to students at a local university taking the marketing option with the instruction that they were to give their personal interpretation not a text book version .
Not unsurprising we got a strew of answers that had a loose convergence which was interesting given that these students were training to become marketers yet they had such diverse understandings of the discipline they were training for .
As a control group we had asked the students in the accounting and finance options to tell us what they thought accounting and finance meant . The answers were clear and to the point with no fluffy padding as we would have expected of students specializing in a discipline .
The response we liked best from the marketing students was this definition that stated ‘ Marketing is the identification or creation of wants and the process involved in satisfying these wants in an economic or socially viable manner ’.
To be fair to the students we must also state that we also decided to interview several practicing Marketing Managers to get their definition of marketing and here the definitions got really weird but we realized that many were not formally trained marketers although they headed the function .
For comparison one dictionary definition we picked defined Marketing as both ‘ the process or technique of promoting , selling and distributing a product or service ’ and ‘ an aggregate of functions involved in moving goods from producer to consumer ’.
The American Marketing Association ( AMA ) defines marketing a ‘ 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 contrast the American version to the British one by the Chartered Institute of Marketing ( CIM ), whose definition states that ‘ Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying , anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably ’.
While sifting through some international trade magazines we came across an interesting and pragmatic definition of marketing from a currently practicing marketing professional who captured the essence of marketing in a simple understandable way .
What we particularly liked about his definition is his appreciation of the fact that defining marketing was not simple and he therefore skewed his definition depending on whether he was talking to a layman or to a fellow professional .
He stated that he has two versions of defining marketing . The first one assumes that he is communicating to a nonmarketing person or that he is required to answer the question in the shortest time possible with clarity .
To him ‘ marketing is influencing a person or business to take action ” whether one