Defining Marketing

This paper will look at my personal definition of marketing and the definitions of marketing from Basic marketing: A marketing strategy planning approach (18th ed.) and Marketing management (14th ed.). The definitions presented will reinforce how marketing supports organizational success in business. By providing examples from various companies that use marketing to increase business it will be clear that marketing supports success in business.

My personal definition prior to reading chapters assigned for Marketing 421 was advertising and promoting a business, service, or product to gain additional business. I believed marketing departments were used to create proposals in an attempt to win work with a competitive bid. Promoting a company by getting the companies name and services out to the public using printed company materials like pens, pencils, sticky notes, or other items to give away and hand out at seminars, lectures, and job fairs.

Basic marketing: A marketing strategy planning approach (18th ed.) defines marketing as “the performance of activities that seek to accomplish an organization’s objectives by anticipating customer or client needs and directing a flow of need-satisfying goods and services from producer to customer or client” (p. 6, para. 6). Kotler, P., & Keller, K. L. (2012) defines marketing in Marketing management (14th ed.) as, “identifying and meeting human and social needs. One of the shortest good definitions of marketing is “meeting needs profitably” (p. 5 para. 2). “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” (Kotler, P., & Keller, K. L. (2012). Based on the