What is Marketing?

In the first section of our highly detailed Principles of Marketing Tutorials we lay the groundwork for our study of the field of marketing with a close look at marketing’s key concepts and the important tasks marketers perform.  We will see that marketing encompasses a wide array of business decisions that are essential to the success of nearly all organizations.

Coverage in this part of the tutorial includes a close examination of the definition of marketing.  A dissection of the key terms in the definition will show that marketing’s primary focus is to identify and satisfy customers in a way that helps build a solid and, hopefully, sustained relationship that encourages customers to continue doing business with the marketer.

We also will spend a short time on the history of marketing and see how it has evolved from a process centered on simply getting as many people as possible to purchase a product to today’s highly complex efforts designed to build long term customer relationships.  Additionally, we’ll see that marketing is not only important to individual organizations it also carries both positive and negative influences at a broader societal level.  Finally we look at what it takes to be a marketer in today’s world.