What is Marketing ?
People in a society have different meanings of marketing. Most popularly, marketing is perceived as activities like selling and advertising. Members of society are today exposed to TV and radio commercials, newspaper ads, billboards, neon signs, direct mail, sales calls, and innumerable types of other sales stimuli. But selling and advertising are only two of many marketing functions and are often less important than others. Today, we no longer accept the orthodox meaning of marketing - making a sale. Modern marketing must be understood in the new sense of satisfying customer needs. Experiences confirm that if the marketer understands consumer needs properly, designs products that provide superior value, prices them competitively, and distributes and promotes them efficiently, success in selling is guaranteed. To quote Peter Drucker, "Marketing aims to make selling superfluous. The aim is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits .... and sells itself".
Philip Kotler and Gary Armstrong define marketing "as a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others". This definition contains the following important terms: needs, wants, and demands; products; value, satisfaction, and quality; exchange, transactions, and relationship and markets. Figure 1-1 shows that each of these core marketing concepts is linked with the previous one. To have a comprehensive meaning of marketing, we will now examine these concepts.
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