Marketing

Definition

Marketing is an integrated communications-based process through which individuals and communities are informed or persuaded that existing and newly-identified needs and wants may be satisfied by the products and services of others.

Marketing is used to create the customer, to keep the customer and to satisfy the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, it can be concluded that Marketing is one of the premier components of Business Management - the other being Operations(or Production). Other services and management activities such as Human Resources, Accounting, Law and Legal aspects can be "bought in" or "contracted out".

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 term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to a market to buy or sell goods or services.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as "The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably."

Marketing practice tended to be seen as a creative industry in the past, which included advertising, distribution and selling. However, because the academic study of marketing makes extensive use of social sciences, psychology, sociology, mathematics, economics, anthropology and neuroscience, the profession is now widely recognized as a science, allowing numerous universities to offer Master-of-Science (MSc) programmes. The overall process starts with marketing research and goes through market segmentation, business planning and execution, ending with pre and post-sales promotional activities. It is also related to many of the creative arts. The marketing literature is also adept at re-inventing itself and its vocabulary according to the times and the culture.

Seen from a systems point of view, sales process engineering views marketing as a set of processes that are interconnected and interdependent with other functions, whose methods can be improved using a variety of relatively new approaches.

Related lists

See List of marketing topics for an extensive list of the marketing articles.

• List of management topics
• List of human resource management topics
• List of economics topics
• List of finance topics
• List of accounting topics
• List of information technology management topics
• List of production topics
• List of business law topics
• List of international trade topics
• List of business ethics, political economy, and philosophy of business topics
• List of business theorists

References