Marketing has travelled a lot in its philosophical journey from orientation to Production to Product to Selling to Finance to Marketing to Relationship marketing and finally to value- based marketing. Asking an average person about marketing may evince responses, like “marketing is selling or advertising”, marketers make people buy which they don’t need, and likewise. But this is not an enlightened view.
The word marketing encompasses such a broad scope of activities and ideas that settling on one definition is often difficult. Among authorities on marketing they too have defined it in several ways. Many of them in the pace of time have changed their focus as well.
The Definition of Chartered Institute of Marketing – An analysis:
The concept of putting customer at the centre of the business strategy is key to marketing, and the definition also includes the idea that we (the marketer) are not interested in any and every customer, but only those whose needs can be satisfied profitably. Satisfying the needs is done through market research. The definition also says that marketing is a management process, which requires planning and analysis, resources, investment of money and time, and monitoring and evaluation.
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But the weaknesses are – first, the non-commercial activities like child care or equal treatment to child girls are outside the scope of CIM definition. Second, it excludes other stakeholders like shareholders and employees. Third, people whose needs are being met are not always customers.
American Marketing Association’s Definition:
Present definition is an improvement over its previous definition. It agrees to that marketing is a management process rather than one function among others; it is about satisfying individual objectives of different stakeholders instead of only consumers including society at large; it also introduces the idea that marketing is about creating exchanges, and that it is about meeting organizational objectives whether this means profit or not.
The delivery of value to customers also takes into view the role of customers in actively producing value.
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One big weakness of this definition is that marketers are often concerned with competitors, but the definition (like the earlier definition) does not address it.
Philip Kotler and Kevin Keller (Marketing Management, 12th ed., 2006, Pearson):
“Marketing management is the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value.”
This is the value-based concept of marketing – relationship between what is paid and what is received. The definition includes all types of exchanges and thus fails to differentiate between buyer and seller.
The definition also talks about ‘need’ and ‘want’. To most non- marketers, a need is something which is essential to survival, whereas a want is something which is no more than a passing fancy. For marketers these definitions are inadequate because there are so many products which are essential to some* people, luxuries to others, and actually dangerous for others.
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Of late, the emphasis in the concept of marketing is on value creation for both the investors and the customers. Superior value to customers is bound to create value for the shareholders.
Peter Doyle (2000) has in this context defined marketing as:
“Marketing is the management process that seeks to maximize returns to shareholders by developing and implementing strategies to build relationships of trust with high-value customers and to create a sustainable differential advantage.”
Ma et al. define seven elements of customer value attributes – features, availability, reliability, assurance, empathy, conformance, and security.