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Lesson 1.1. Defining Marketing as a Function and Practice

Marketing Defined

When you think about the word marketing, what comes to mind?

Some of the words you thought of may have included

  • advertising,
  • sales,
  • social media
  • digital
  • price,
  • money,
  • purchase,
  • communication,
  • ecommerce,
  • products,
  • market share,
  • research, and
  • brands.

Marketing is an umbrella term that encompasses all of these concepts and many more. Many people equate advertising with marketing. Advertising is certainly a component of marketing, but modern marketing has a relationship with (and impact on) almost every business function in today’s organization. Without marketing, brands and products cannot be successful.

The American Marketing Association (2017) defines marketing 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."


That’s a quite a definition—and it's certainly encompassing. But let’s simplify it a bit.

Your textbook authors, Kotler, Keller, and Chernev (2021) define marketing as "identifying and meeting human and social needs" in ways that "harmonize with the organization."

Some marketers define marketing as a critical business function that has the ultimate goal of building and maintaining relationships with customers. Anything that can impact those relationships, from the product to the supply chain, is something that marketers need to be concerned about. 

As you can see from these definitions, the heart of marketing is communication and connection—making customers aware of brands and offerings and converting that awareness into key behavioral outcomes, such as purchases, loyalty, and recommendations. Seems simple enough, right? Ha! Most marketers would heartily acknowledge that marketing, especially in today’s consumer environment, is quite challenging.

Marketing as an Art and Science

Video: What Is Marketing Today?

A Brief Introduction to the Field of Marketing

SETH GODIN: Hi, I'm Seth Godin. I'm the founder of the altMBA and the author of a book called This Is Marketing. Marketing used to be a side effect. We had a factory. It was busy. We said to the marketing team, "Here's some money. Go sell average stuff to average people." Not true anymore. Marketing is at the core of what we do. And unless you make coal or oil, marketing is the story you tell, who you're telling it to, why people are going to buy it. It's the center of the universe. And what that means is that you're responsible. You're responsible for what you make, how you make it, how you bring it to the world, what the side effects are, who you're talking to. Everyone works for you, because what we know is that a product well marketed is a product that people want to engage in. And an amazing product that no one knows about or cares about isn't amazing, because we don't get to use it. So I coined this term modern marketer to identify somebody who isn't beholden to buying mass-media TV ads to be in front of average people with their average product. That's old-school marketing. That's Mad Men. It's faded away. It's almost gone. The idea that you can buy enough gross rating points to interrupt enough people to make enough money to do it again? Gone. And so what we're seeing on the internet is a whole bunch of companies tried to simulate TV. They tried to come up with viral stuff. They tried to come up with scams and hikes just to get a lot of eyeballs. It doesn't work. The fact is that TV was a mass medium, and the internet is a micro medium. You can't buy Facebook. You can't even buy Yahoo. You can't buy all the ads. It's lots and lots of tiny slices. So pick your slice. And measure when you need to measure. Don't measure when measuring doesn't make any sense. And realize that what we are seeking as an asset is connection, attention, trust, and connection, not spam or interruption. Simon is brilliant, as always, and understanding your why is critical, but it's also usually awfully general. My why is because I need to make a living. My why is because the beach is too full. My why is I want to feel fulfilled by doing this work, which leads to the next question: Well, what am I going to do now? Which is, how do I know if I'm doing a good job? Which is, what is this all for? And so for me, it begins with seeing who we seek to serve and figuring out how to make things better for them, not for me but for them, because if I can make things better for them, then I'll get a chance to do it again. And if I can keep doing it and doing it, making things better, weaving things together, earning trust, turning attention into a promise and that promise into a brand that matters, then regardless of what I do for a living, regardless of what my why is, my practice is a professional one because I'm not leaving behind victims. Instead, I'm opening the door for people to do better. Everything we do as a marketer has an effect. I'm not even going to say side effect, just an effect. And you have to own the effect that if you sell a product that's going to cause people to get lung cancer, that's on you. You didn't have to sell it. They didn't have to buy it either. But if marketing works, you're on the hook because marketing works, and you did the marketing. So what we get the chance to do is make stuff we're proud of. And do it in a way that causes the effects to be things that we are proud of. So yes, you could build a social network that pits people against each other and gets them at each other's throats. That's on you. And each one of us has all these levers available to us. Little-known fact that the person who invented the gas—the Freon gas that put a hole in the ozone layer—also invented leaded gasoline. Same guy. Not a good run for him. It was on him, those two inventions. What are we going to invent? Can we invent things that will make things better? Because that's how we change the world for the better. Make things better by making better things. Hi. It's Seth Godin. And I'm here on the HubSpot Academy channel. If you're into marketing like I am, subscribe, and you'll learn more. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Good marketing has become increasingly vital for business success. And good marketing is no accident, but a result of careful planning and execution. Marketing management is an art and a science; it involves getting, keeping, and growing a customer base through creating, delivering, and communicating value. In the pursuit of business success, marketers must engage in many activities, including the following:

  • examining the characteristics of customers through research;
  • identifying and characterizing appropriate markets;
  • determining the duties and responsibilities of marketing employees within the organization and making appropriate resource-allocation decisions;
  • determining customer needs and aligning products with them;
  • developing marketing programs, plans, and strategies;
  • communicating brand and product value;
  • building and maintaining brand equity;
  • setting the right pricing;
  • identifying the most appropriate channels for distribution;
  • planning the retail environment;
  • selecting the most effective communication channels;
  • supporting customer relationship development and management;
  • managing the holistic customer experience (across product, purchasing, and after-purchase experiences); and
  • measuring company performance results and evaluating progress.

You can see from this list that marketing covers many areas. All of these activities can be grouped into two main categories: demand creation and demand fulfillment. These activities represent a company's efforts to satisfy customer wants and needs by offering products and services that create value and satisfaction. The company should evaluate its value creation and delivery processes from the customer's point of view. If there are deficiencies in value delivery and enhancement, the company then redesigns those processes to make sure that they create satisfaction and value. A company that does this is said to have a marketing orientation. More recently, the term customer orientation has come into use, reflecting a focus on individual customers rather than groups of customers. Companies that have another orientation, such as a production orientation or a sales orientation, will generally not be as successful over the long run, though they may achieve short-term success. We’ll talk more about this in an upcoming lesson.

To become more successful in competitive markets, companies need to monitor and scan the market environment constantly and act appropriately. Both marketing-research and demand-forecasting techniques are utilized for gathering necessary information from the marketplace. The information collected is useful in the development of strategic marketing plans, programs, and strategies. It also facilitates the marketing decision-making process, guiding marketing managers in developing effective corporate-level, business (divisional) unit–level, and strategic business unit–level marketing plans. Your textbook discusses the marketing management process and the organizational marketing orientation, providing the main characteristics of marketing concepts and strategies with company examples.


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