Defining Marketing

Defining Marketing

Ken Drake

MKT/421

March 5, 2013

Mark McClintock

Defining Marketing.

Marketing is the performance of activities that seek to accomplish an organization's objectives by anticipating customer or client needs and directing a flow of need satisfying goods and services from producer to customer or client (Perreault, Cannon, McCarthy, 2011 page 6).

We, as individuals or groups, practice marketing without even thinking about it, and if we are in business for yourselves, we become very good at it. We must market ourselves and our skill in order to get more business and/or sales. A young man will market himself to a beautiful young woman in order to get her attention. It happens every day, but in business there are extra benefits. One of the key reasons that marketing is so important is because it encourages companies and people to conduct research and come up with innovations. This develops into the spreading of these great ideas, goods and services.

It is very important to remember that marketing should not be considered just selling or advertising but an endeavor to identify the customers' needs so well that what you offer almost sells itself. This goes for an idea you are promoting, a product that you make, or a service you provide, and continues on through the customer service phase all the way to the possible disposal and recycling of the item.

In the end, marketing is all about exchanges. In fact, marketing doesn't occur unless two or more parties are willing to exchange something for something else. (Perreault, Cannon, McCarthy, 2011 page 7). If this were a perfect world, each family would produce its own goods and therefore have no need for marketing, but this is not a perfect world and we need marketing to keep our economy growing and new ideas making our lives better and easier.

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 (American Marketing Association, 2007).

Marketing research is the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information--information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process. Marketing research specifies the information required to address these issues, designs the method for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process, analyzes the results, and communicates the findings and their