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What Is Marketing – New Definition

Robert Kingston at SmallBusinessBranding.com shared a new definition of marketing by the American Marketing Association:

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.

What amuses me is that this is a definition done by marketers for marketers. It adds nothing to the understanding of concept or, as a matter of fact, a reasoning a small business owner should include a Marketing row in his cash flow statement.

I am not a marketing professional, only learning, but for me this definition is like saying the water is wet. I’d rather had someone explain all this in English. My own versions of definitions would look closer to the following statements.

Advertising – is when some dude just shouts out good stuff about his merchandise or service.

Marketing – is when someone else spends enormous amounts of time, money and effort figuring out who exactly must be the shouting dude, what kind of stuff he needs to shout and where exactly he needs to stand in order to get as many annoyed people as possible.

Sales – poor people who get to deal with the folks annoyed to such a degree that they have decided to consider buying something that the first dude is shouting about.

3 replies on “What Is Marketing – New Definition”

I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.

Matt Hanson

Hi Zealus,

It’s a very academic view of marketing and you’re right, it was written for marketers. After doing marketing for a number of years now, I’ve come to appreciate that marketing isn’t just about, advertising, sales and market research.

Marketing to me, involves everything from defining the business you should be in, planning long term goals, promotion, branding, sales, customer retention and more.

Marketing is about finding out how to fulfill the needs of your customers and get something in return. It’s about creating, delivering and recieving value. When you look at it like that, you soon understand that value has to be created and maintained at each level of the business. So when you read a broad definition of marketing like what the AMA has come up with, it’s easy to feel lost. I remember when I first got into marketing, I had trouble discerning what these broad definitions of marketing meant, but it’ll grow on you.

Thanks for the post, Zealus. I’ll try to keep the marketing mumbo jumbo to a minimum in future and explain things a little better.

Rob

@Matt

Thanks, I’ll do my best 🙂

@Rob Kingston

I work with small business clients who, among other things, don’t have time for academic mumbo-jumbo. I used to speak “acadenglish” until learned (the hard way) to get my point across as fast and sharp as possible. Thus the drive to make it short, quick and understandable.

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