What is marketing and how can it be defined? Depending upon who one talks to or where one decides to look they will get a different answer but will have the basically same definition. Some people think marketing is as easy as throwing an attractive girl with a bikini on standing on the beach with a beer in her hand. Marketing is much more than “selling” or “advertising”. Marketing basic definition is the use of Product, Place, Promotion, and Price, commonly known as the “four Ps”. Marketing refers to promotion and can also involve pricing, product placement and distribution when relevant. Promotion can be limited to a specific target group, or it can be aimed at the general public. Although marketing is often interchangeably used with the word advertising, marketing can be more specifically described as the game plan by which the advertising will be carried out, as in a marketing strategy.

What is Marketing?-  When thinking of how to define marketing, I believe that it is the steps that a company or organization does in order to spark a potential customer into buying their products. Marketing comes in many forms and is not limited to advertisements, sales, promotions, and sometimes is done as a part of publicrelations. When a company produces a product, begins to promote the product they produced, correctly price and defines the placement of the product this is all examples of marketing. Marketing can be viewed and defined as basically anything that a company does that ensures the sale of their goods or services that captures a certain market share.

Definition of Marketing, Source one – The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large”  The AMA believes that marketing is the function that potentially links the customer/consumer to the company/marketer through information–information used to identify and define marketingopportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process. Marketing research specifies the information required to address these issues, designs the method for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process, analyzes the results, and communicates the findings and their implications.

Definition of Marketing, Source two – BusinessDictionary.com defines marketing as Management process through which goods and services move from concept to the customer. As a philosophy, it is based on thinking about the business in terms of customer needs and their satisfaction. Marketing differs from selling because (in the words of Harvard Business School's emeritus professor of marketing Theodore C. Levitt) "Selling concerns itself with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about. And it does not, as marketing invariably does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse, and satisfy customer needs."

Marketing in an Organization – At its base, marketing is about the strategies and tactics you use to identify and cultivate the market for your products/services – so it would seem to be pretty important to overall organizational success. The degree of importance is arguable based on the industry, but I can't think of any business that can survive without giving some thought to the way in which they grow demand for what they're selling. In many businesses, marketing needs to be a core concern, and often the overriding concern when it comes to running a successful business.