What is Marketing? Marketing Professionals Should Know

What is Marketing? Marketing professionals should know. Today I read in a blog from a well-known lead generation agency, a post on “explaining marketing to a 6 year old.” The explanation suggested by the author was limited, at best, wrong, at worst. It was a re-hash of his similar discussion on LinkedIn.  From time to time, it’s amazing, while also disappointing and sad, to see the disparate, limited, and many times wrong definitions coming from people in the role of “marketing.”

Before we go any further, Marketing is the Transformational Engine for Growth. As strategy, it is one of the most important elements in business to get right before all others.

What is Marketing? Marketing Professionals Should know

The respondents to these threads are people in various marketing roles. Marketers’ definitions are often poor, limited, and often wrong – but mostly, incomplete. Marketing professionals ought to know what Marketing is, in the broadest sense. Knowing this well, and the difference between what it is they do on a day to day basis should be the impetus to elevate their own chosen profession. More specifically marketing professionals should be broadening marketing inside their own companies increasing its functional contribution in terms of business value.

Grounding the Definition

The definition of Marketing postulated in the blog was: “Marketing is what you do in business when you try to convince people to buy what you have to sell.” If that sounds limited to you – it is.

Consider Kellogg Graduate School of Management’s professor and authority on the subject, Philip Kotler, and the 4Ps of the marketing mix. Any marketing  professional or business school graduate should recall them, Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Others may prefer to ground a definition in the 5Cs situation analysis and its relation to creating value, capturing value and sustaining value. Marketing Analysis in the 5Cs model is grounded in: Customers, Company, Competitors, Collaborators and Context. the figure to the right is taken from my prior post: Drucker and Kotler, How Could We have Drifted From Fundamentals, where you can read more about the full definition of Marketing, as a profession, and it’s context with social media and modern marketing.

The definition presented in the blog I read is really only just promotion (refer to the figure to the right). [Don’t confuse this with “promotions”, or the logo key chains, pens  and other tchotchkes, trinkets and souvenirs received at events and trade shows.]

Crowdsourcing the Definition of Marketing

The problem with asking people in a blog forum to define the term “marketing” is that it is a broad domain. As a business professional, you know that marketing is involved with nearly every strategic element of business. But, individual responses will define it based on what their unique marketing experience is, or what their job profile says they should do, which may be a limited reflection based on who wrote the job description (HR?) and the specific needs for that company.

Marketing as Strategy

In broad terms, “Marketing is Strategy” and has a defined domain across the entire business, including what products and features to sell, what customer experiences must be nurtured, what markets and customer segments to target, what price and what business models to reach those targets, forward looking and rearward result-measuring research, real-time metrics and tuning, and deep strategic activity integrated into the core of the business. (In the interest of brevity, I’m sure I forgot something in this list.)

Nirmalya Kumar in his book “Marketing as Strategy” does an exceptional job to define marketing in these broad terms, and describing the functional definition in terms of business, the organization, and an enterprise. The link here goes to a book review that can give you a high level overview of this London School of Economics professor’s modern (2004) perspective.

To Ponder

Marketing, in its true sense, is so much more. CEOs are demanding this more complete definition of “marketing” from those that are in the profession. The research from” IBM Global CMO Study 2011, Aberdeen, Aberdeen / Heidrick and Struggles Report on “The Evolved CMO 2012 and Russell Reynolds (private report), has articulated this new definition of Marketing very clearly.

What Do YOU Want To Be Defined As?

When defining or explaining marketing, do you want to be the guy that “promotes” a product, or do you want to be seen by your 6 year old as the “transformational engine inside the corporation that delivers substantial revenue and increased profitability?”  Kids as well as our business colleagues don’t need a dumbed-down definition of marketing – tell it like it is.  What is marketing? Marketing professionals should know.

Please Comment

What is marketing? Marketing professionals ought to know. And, I think you do. The corporate world, and your company needs you to be heard. If you are a VP of Marketing, or a CMO, with leadership domain in a group that understands the depth of marketing, or if you are a Marketing Professional passionate about the definition, and deep business function of Marketing, and understand the extensive contribution that you make in your organization, please share a supporting thought below.

Classic Definitions of Marketing

For fun – here are some classic definitions of marketing from well-known thought leaders.  They demonstrate the value contribution to a business. True marketing professionals should not limit their own articulation for the value they deliver to the companies they work for, nor should they dumb-down the meaning since that propagates the misinformation.

• Kumar in “Marketing as Strategy:” “Marketing is the transformational engine […] that delivers substantial revenue growth and increased profitability.”
• Kotler in his textbook “Understanding Marketing Management” (2009): “Marketing is about identifying and meeting human and social needs. […, and] meeting [those] needs profitably.”
• The American Marketing Association: “Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders. (quoted from Kotler’s textbook)
• Drucker: “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.” (quoted from Kotler’s textbook)
• Dictionary.com: “the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.”

Image Credit: StockVault, Alexandr, Free Image license.