Blog 1: So What Actually is Marketing?

Hi, I’m Marissa and this is my marketing blog! This semester I will be taking my very first course on marketing. While this is not my first introduction to marketing, it is my first time in a course that's solely devoted to it. Because of this I’m coming into the semester with many of my own ideas about what I already think marketing is. However, from the bits and pieces I do already know about marketing I am aware that it is far more complex than it seems!

So, for my first post I thought it would make sense to talk about the true definition of marketing. How do you define marketing? One thing that I know for certain is that marketing involves many moving parts. Most people would probably define marketing as the way in which a company informs consumers about its product. While this is true, I found out that it comes nowhere close to the full scope of what marketing truly is. 

According to our textbook, marketing is defined as “the activity for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that benefit its customers, the organization, its stakeholders, and society at large.”

While this definition seems intimidating at first, it really isn’t that tricky if you take the time to break it down. In a previous business course I learned about the notorious“4 P’s” of marketing, which are product, promotion, place, and price. Thus, whenever I think marketing my brain automatically remembers these terms. With this in mind, if you look back at the textbook definition you can see that all it is really trying to say is that marketing is the creating (aka the product), communicating (aka the promotion), delivering (aka the placement), and exchanging (aka the price) of offerings.

• Creating ----> Product
• Communication ----> Promotion
• Delivering ----> Placement
• Exchanging ----> Price

The latter portion of the formal definition above refers to the people who are both directly and indirectly involved with marketing. Those people are the consumers of the product also known as the customers, the business itself and its stakeholders, as well as society at large. This is an important piece of the definition because it shows that marketing isn’t just a term for businessmen. Marketing impacts us all no matter who we are or what our relation to the product is.

With that being said, I have a feeling that much of this course will be spent discussing the marketing that is around us each and every day of our lives. Simply put, marketing is everywhere in today's society! Thus it is important that we learn about the ways in which it both consciously and subconsciously affects us.

To make my blog more fun and to reinforce some of the most basic concepts of marketing that we will be learning about this semester, I thought it would be good to conclude my first post with a short video clip that highlights some of these key terms in a more informal way. By the end of this video clip it should hopefully be easier recognizing terms like direct marketing, advertising, brand recognition, customer feedback, the demand and supply gap, and markets.

That's all for now,
-XOXO M

Sources:

Marketing, 12^th Edition Roger Kerin, Steven Hartley, William Rudelius. McGraw-Hill: New York, 2015

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CU_Zd6ExfA