What is Marketing? How is it different than promotions, advertising and all this new social marketing discussion?
Marketing is a core business function that deals with how you are going to deliver value to your customers. Marketing takes into account your customers needs and wants, it deals with the organizations communication strategy and it also has an internal communication component.
Marketing is all-inclusive as it contains the 4 P’s – one of which is Promotions. When defining the 4 P’s of marketing – Promotions is defined as any way in which an organization spreads the message about their company and their products or services.
Promotions (again one of the 4 P’s of Marketing) includes many elements of marketing – one of which is Advertising – paid communications. Another of which is ‘Sales Promotions’ – events, activities, contests, etc. (kind of a catch-all for all the secondary marketing activities that companies do).
To conclude – a definition of Marketing I have used is ‘Marketing is EVERYTHING related to (that affects) the sale and transfer of your product to your client’.
You must also remember that the Customer Experience is EVERYTHING!