The American Marketing Association offers the following formal definition: 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.
Marketing management as the art and science of choosing target market and getting, keeping, growing customers through creating, delivering and communicating superior customer value.
Marketing is about identifying and meeting human and social needs.
One of the shortest good definitions of marketing is “meeting needs profitably.”
Marketing management takes place when at least one party to a potential exchange thinks about the means of achieving desired responses from other parties.
Thus, we see marketing management as the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value.
We can distinguish between a social and a managerial definition of marketing. A social definition shows the role marketing plays in society; for example, one marketer has said that marketing’s role is to “deliver a higher standard of living.”
Here is a social definition that serves our purpose: Marketing is a societal process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering, and freely exchanging products and services of value with others. Cocreation of value among consumers and with businesses and the importance of value creation and sharing have become important themes in the development of modern marketing thought.
Managers sometimes think of marketing as “the art of selling products,” but many people are surprised when they hear that selling is not the most important part of marketing! Selling is only the tip of the marketing iceberg. Peter Drucker, a famed management theorist, put it this way. There will always, one can assume, be a need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then is to make the product or service available. When Nintendo designed its Wii game system when Apple launched its iPad tablet computer, and when Toyota introduced its Prius hybrid automobile, these manufacturers were swamped with orders because they had designed the right product, based on careful marketing homework about consumers, competition, and all the external factors that affect cost and demand.
