Marketing
Marketing is an integrated communications-based process
through which individuals and communities discover that
existing and newly-identified needs and wants may be
satisfied by the products and services of others.
Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association
as 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. The term developed from the original meaning which
referred literally to going to market, as in shopping, or going
to a market to buy or sell goods or services.
The Chartered Institute of Marketing, which is the world's
largest marketing body, defines marketing as "The
management process responsible for identifying, anticipating
and satisfying customer requirements profitably."
Marketing practice tended to be seen as a creative industry in the past,
which included advertising, distribution and selling. However, because
marketing makes extensive use of social sciences, psychology, sociology,
mathematics, economics, anthropology and neuroscience, the profession
is now widely recognised a science, allowing numerous universities to
offer Master-of-Science (MSc) programmes. The overall process starts
with marketing research and goes through market segmentation,
business planning and execution, ending with pre and post-sales
promotional activities. It is also related to many of the creative arts.
The marketing literature is also infamous for re-inventing itself and its
vocabulary according to the times and the culture.
Seen from a systems point of view, sales process engineering views
marketing as a set of processes that are interconnected and
interdependent with other functions, whose methods can be improved
using a variety of relatively new approaches.
