Marketing: What Is It and Why Is It Different to Selling?

Short Essay – ‘ Marketing – What is it? And Why is it Different to Selling?’

Marketing is a crucial aspect of how corporations develop a set of activities to transfer value, through exchange, to their customers. Marketing can be simply described as delivering customer value and satisfaction at a profit. Businesses use marketing with the goal of enticing new customers by promising superior value and retaining existing customers by delivering satisfaction. One widely used definition of marketing is ‘ an activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large.’ (Kotler, Adam, Denize, & Armstrong , 2009 ).

Marketing plays an important role in society, not only providing many with a career path but it also affects your everyday life and it is critical in creating successful businesses. You participate in the marketing process as a consumer as marketing makes all goods including necessities such as food available when we want it, in desired quantities, at accessible locations, and in sanitary and convenient packages and forms. As well as in everyday life all business people need to be familiar with the terminologies and fundamentals of marketing as people in all business areas need to be able to communicate with specialist from other areas. Marketing is not just done by people in the marketing department but a job of everyone in the organization. (Lamb, Hair Jr. , & McDaniel, 2008). As David Packard, co founder of Hewlett-Packard said, “Marketing is too important to be left only to the marketing department.”

Traditionally marketing was only seen as a link between consumer and producer, which is a very sales orientated view. In this sales era of marketing companies would make as much as they could make, and get rid of as much as they could get rid of, and it was as basic as that. Marketing as it is today came from the need to...