1.1.3 A definition of marketing
A widely used current definition of marketing is that adopted by the American Marketing Association as shown in Summers et al. (2003, p. 6):
Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organisational goals.
Consider this
Compare this definition with the characteristics you noted about marketing and the definition you gave at the start of this chapter. How similar is it? Did you capture some of the key characteristics? What differences are there between your definition and that of the American Marketing Association?
When people talk about marketing, they often think of it only as advertising, or as selling, or perhaps both of these. However, we can see from the above definition that marketing is much more.
Figure 1.1 attempts to present the definition of marketing in a visual form. It attempts to highlight both the simplicity of marketing as a process, and its complexity in terms of the detail of that process.
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