Additional Information:

How do the professionals define marketing? According to the American Marketing Association, ‘marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders’.

The World Marketing Association defines marketing as ‘the core business philosophy that directs the processes of identifying and fulfilling the needs of individuals and organizations through exchanges which create superior value for all parties’.

And finally, the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing says that ‘marketing is the management process for identifying, anticipating and satisfying consumer requirements profitably’.

If we just look at the commonalities of these three definitions, we can see that, in essence, marketing is;

a) discovering and giving consumers what they want and need, and

b) doing this at a profit.

2. History of Marketing

It is hard for many to believe, but when compared to economics, production and operations, accounting and other business areas, marketing is a relatively young discipline having emerged in the early 1900s. Prior to this time most issues that are now commonly associated with marketing were either assumed to fall within basic concepts of economics (e.g., price setting was viewed as a simple supply/demand issue), advertising (well developed by 1900), or in most cases were simply not yet explored (не досліджені) (e.g., customer purchase behavior, importance of distribution partners).

Marketing is a relatively young discipline, and it is important to note that there is still considerable disagreement and debate among academics and practitioners about what marketing is and is not. In particular, there is disagreement about what the boundaries of marketing are. The key principle agreed on by all marketing academics is that marketing places the customer at the centre of all marketing thought. [SAGE Course Companions, p.3]

Lead by marketing scholars from several major universities, the development of marketing was in large part motivated by the need to dissect (проаналізувати) in greater detail relationships and behaviors that existed between sellers and buyers. In particular, the study of marketing lead sellers to recognize that adopting certain strategies and tactics could significantly benefit the seller/buyer relationship. In the old days of marketing (before the 1950s) this often meant identifying strategies and tactics for simply selling more products and services with little regard for what customers really wanted. Often this lead companies to embrace (охоплювати, включати) a “sell-as-much-as-we-can” philosophy with little concern for building relationships for the long term.

But starting in the 1950s, companies began to see that old ways of selling were wearing thin with customers. As competition (конкуренція) grew stiffer (ставала жорсткішою) across most industries, organizations looked to the buyer side of the transaction for ways to improve. What they found was an emerging philosophy suggesting that the key factor in successful marketing is to understanding the needs of customers. This now famous “marketing concept” suggests marketing decisions should flow from FIRST knowing the customer and what they want. Only then should an organization initiate the process of developing and marketing products and services. The marketing concept continues to be at the root of most marketing efforts, though the concept does have its own problems (e.g., doesn’t help much with marketing new technologies) a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this tutorial. But overall (Але, в цілому) marketers have learned they can no longer limit their marketing effort to just getting customers to purchase more. They must have an in-depth understanding of who their customers are and what they want.