Definition & Meaning
Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as:
“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.“
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
Peter Drucker
According to Cochrane “a market is some sphere or space, where certain physical and institutional arrangements could be seen, and the forces of demand and supply are at work to determine prices with a view of transferring the ownership of some quantity of good or service.
Meaning: The term ‘marketing’ can be defined analytically or operationally. The analytic way of explaining the terms to show how marketing differs from various other activities of a firm, marketing deals with identifying and meeting human and social needs. One of the shortest definitions of marketing is “meeting needs profitably”.
Definitions: According to kotler: “Marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires”
“Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives”
Needs: Something necessary for people to live a healthy, stable and safe life. When needs remain unfulfilled, there is a clear adverse outcome: a dysfunction or death. Needs can be objective and physical, such as the need for food, water and shelter; or subjective and psychological, such as the need to belong to a family or social group and the need for self-esteem.
Wants: Something that is desired, wished for or aspired to. Wants are not essential for basic survival and are often shaped by culture.
Demands: When needs and wants are backed by the ability to pay, they have the potential to become economic demands.
Marketing is perhaps the most important activity in a business because it has a direct effect on profitability and sales. Larger businesses will dedicate specific staff and departments for the purpose of marketing. It is important to realise that marketing cannot be carried out in isolation from the rest of the business.
For example:The marketing section of a business needs to work closely with operations, research and development, finance and human resources to check their plans are possible. Operations will need to use sales forecasts produced by the marketing department to plan their production schedules. Sales forecasts will also be an important part of the budgets produced by the finance department, as well as the deployment of labour for the human resources department. A research and development department will need to work very closely with the marketing department to understand the needs of the customers and to test outputs of the R&D section.