What is Marketing?

It is challenging to define Marketing in one succinct description, but the American Marketing Association gives us a decent starting point with their answer to the above question:

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.¹

While fairly specific, this is still isn’t very clear though, right? Let’s decipher a more helpful definition while defining what Marketing is not.

Marketing vs. Advertising

Many people mix up Marketing with a specific sub-section of the practice called Advertising.

While most interaction with Marketing seems to come from being bombarded with ads everywhere we turn our attention, there is much more to Marketing than just getting people to be aware of your messages.

Advertising is an important part of Marketing, but it is only a portion of the overall framework:

Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service.²

As a matter of act, the very etymology of “advert” reinforces how it is only one specific part of Marketing, being derived from the Latin parts of speech ad “towards” and vertere “to turn”. Advertising is literally the definition of turning people towards something.

On the other hand, a simple, easy-to-remember definition of Marketing hints at the fact that it consists of much more:

Marketing is a business practice that involves identifying, predicting, and meeting customer needs.³

So, while Advertising is necessary to connect a customer-in-need with the valuable solution you can provide, Marketing in fact requires fulfilling the core purpose of a business – solving customer needs in a mutually beneficial way.

This might sound like a broad concept that moves us away from a clear understanding of Marketing, but the field is indeed much broader than many people realize. With a tangible framework of what it actually means to solve customer needs in a mutually beneficial way though, this will make more sense.

The Principles of Marketing

Numerous Marketing models exist, but few, if any, achieve the same clarity and simplicity as those presented by Philip Kotler and Gary Armstrong in their seminal work The Principles of Marketing.

In this book, they define Marketing as:

The process of building profitable customer relationships by creating value for customers and capturing value in return.

Most relevant though is the truly exceptional job they did of summarizing this concept into a digestible framework, which they labeled An Expanded Model of the Marketing Process.

Providing an overview of the core components of Marketing, this model provides a succinct understanding of what Marketing actually is in its entirety.

While this overview is helpful, additional context is needed. Each column in the model above corresponds to the following points of explanation:

Understanding relevant factors about customers (e.g. needs/wants, where they make purchases, how they research purchases, where they live, etc.), along with being aware of the market environment in which you would interact with customers (e.g. competing businesses, legal regulations, economic constraints, etc.)
With informative data and a clear understanding of potential customers and the market in which they exist and operate, defining which customers are optimal to serve (i.e. the customers that you can realistically create the most value for and receive the most value from in return) and deciding how to offer these target customers value that is unique enough to have them engage (e.g. brand positioning/differentiation, innovation, etc.)
With the knowledge of ideal target customers and the niche ways in which you can offer them unique value, one is powerfully equipped to then create a cohesive marketing plan by offering products and services that best satisfy the desires of the customer, at prices that deliver maximum mutual value, distributed in optimal fashion to maximize value as well, and promoted (advertised) in ways that are again most acceptable and beneficial to all parties.
By creating and delivering desired solutions to customers’ problems in a way that coordinates with the market environment, profitable relationships can be built with customers and business partners. In creating a basic relationship by offering solutions to others’ problems, the opportunity exists to strengthen these sometimes surface-level relations into deeper connections and cooperation.
By creating real, quantifiable value for customers, value can rightfully be captured from customers in return.

Interestingly, this “expanded model of the marketing process” also grants us a cohesive workflow with which to zoom in on the different part of Marketing. For example, the classic “4 P’s of Marketing” make up the entire third column of this model.

In a Nutshell

Too often can you see people online answer the question “how do I learn marketing?” with a dogmatic response similar to “learn the 4 P’s and Google Analytics and you’ll figure it out as you go.” With a clear view of the model above, you’ll now understand that such an answer is not only lacking, but that it misses the fundamental purpose of Marketing entirely.

To best be able to understand each piece of the Marketing puzzle and how they work together, it is extremely helpful to understand what the “puzzle” of Marketing exists to accomplish in the first place. That’s what this website is here to explain!

In one final, succinct sentence, Marketing boils down to being able to understand market demands and customer needs, create solutions/offers that have mutual value for the creator and customer, and then communicate and deliver the solution in a way that maximizes value for all parties.