What Is Marketing

What is marketing?

There are plenty of different definitions about how the marketing can be described. It is mainly about meeting the different needs and wants of customers and about understanding the customers themselves in order to find ways how to provide right products or services which are required.

Marketing is the most important activity in a business and it is considered as a central function of many organizations which have implemented a market orientated approach. It is directly influencing the sales and profitability of businesses.

Most of us will connect marketing with selling, pricing, product development, setting of activities like market research (which can adopt some changes in demand) or some kind of advertising, promotion of the product that will attract and keep the customers, because 'people never know what they want until it is presented to them, said Alan Grover., (1994)page 3.

We can define marketing as some management process with the central focus on satisfying customer needs and wants ensuring that its quality, availability and price meet the needs of the market. This must be done efficiently in order to achieve some profitability. "The management process which identifies anticipates and satisfies customer requirements efficiently and profitably."(p.2, Marketing Fundamentals)

So, marketing can be described as both, a management 'philosophy', which determines the strategic orientation of an organisation and function in an organisation involving series of techniques like selling or pricing. Marketing can be also called 'concept' for running the business. Through marketing the organisation can learn more about its customers and competitors so they are able to provide the right products at the right price in the right place for the right quality promoted in the right way in order to achieve the business objectives.

The marketing philosophy involves three basic propositions: customer orientation-which focuses on the needs of the customers, organisational integration-which means that everyone in the organisation is customer orientated not just the marketing department and mutually beneficial exchange-which insist that both organisational and customer needs are met.

Marketing doesn't operate alone from other business activity, that's why it is considered to be a business wide philosophy.

'Marketing is not a function, it is whole business seen from the customer's point of view.' Drucker, P, The ultimate management guru

(2003) page 2.

In fact marketing was developed from trade and exchange, as soon as human beings were able to produce some surplus, more than was necessary for their survival; they exchanged these goods for other goods using Barter system.

The concept of exchange is very important and relates to marketing. It is one of the methods by which a person can satisfy a want or need.

Later on when societies started to develop, there was agreed some medium of exchange, generally 'money' the trade took place.

During the industrial revolution this trade was increasing, because people started to be more dependent on buying goods rather than producing them themselves. There was a mass production, towns started to grow, so people lived further away from producers and it become more difficult and necessary for producers to define what products were desired and wanted.

Mass production brought an increase in demand for goods as there was variety of cheap products available and that's why businesses had to concentrate rather on production and selling than marketing, because the most important was to produce enough of products to satisfy these demands.

Great Britain was dominating world trade until WW1 when there was rise of other industrial powers that had increased the competition. Marketing allowed them to identify right products that will satisfy these customer's needs and to compete effectively so also the industrial products became more widely marketed. In fact there was a situation that production wasn't the main problem anymore, but the 'demand factor', how to increase demand was what the most businesses were focussed on. As a result of this change, marketing techniques have been developed and they were still growing as competition and consumer choices were increasing.

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