Marketing is a fundamental activity in your business. Every process, task, job position, product, service, promotion, and even logistics works effectively when you have successful and ongoing marketing management. However, you often hear about marketing but may ask, “What is marketing?” and “What is it about?” Is it the same as selling products or advertising? If you promote your products or design a supply chain, are you working in marketing for your business? And is marketing even equal to business?
If you have questions like the ones I mentioned above, read this article to find your answers. I have tried to answer these questions and help you gain a comprehensive insight into marketing.
A brief history of marketing
Marketing is a relatively new term in the business world. If you study marketing literature, you won’t find related books before the 20th century. However, in a short time after the introduction of marketing in some books, it became a primary issue in many companies and management books. This was because marketing issues are critical for all businesses. Each business must solve and find answers to marketing challenges; otherwise, it will be removed from the market and replaced by its competitors. Therefore, marketing, in its short history, has shown us deep and important aspects of business, and we want to look at marketing’s path through history to understand where we stand and our future in the marketing journey.
The Production Era (before 1925)
In this era, the production method was slow and also limited. Many goods were produced by hand and with manpower, and machinery methods were limited to some industries such as textile, lumber, and shipbuilding.
In this era, the production value always was under the market need, and what you produced was sold immediately or consumed after production. The warehouse, transformation, and other logistics were limited and also expensive, so there wasn’t access for small businesses.
In the production era, business people focused on efficient production and distribution methods. They emphasized sales methods and didn’t use marketing methods for their products. Packing, promotion, and advertising were limited to some products in a simple way, and many managers didn’t believe in marketing methods to grow their business. In this era, managers tried to produce more goods at a lower price and sell them in the ready markets with low competition.
The Sales Era (1920s-1950s)
In this era, competition became one of the principles in many markets. Many companies found productive ways to produce goods and solve logistic challenges. They could penetrate all accessible markets. So, the share of markets became smaller than in the past. In the sales era, finding ways to sell more products or services was the main challenge for many businesses. Therefore, we can see promotion and sales methods growing in this era, and we see many developments in advertising and printing methods to meet and encounter these challenges.
However, in the sales era, managers focused on sales, but there was a big shift. For the first time, the focus looking from production changed to customers, and this shift helped to grow other marketing principles in the following years.
The Marketing Era (1950s- 1990s)
In this era, marketing principles gradually took shape, and many managers became familiar with marketing issues. Many human science scientists in various disciplines helped managers to complete and shape their knowledge about marketing. So, in this era, we can see the publication of a lot of books, articles, and literature about each part of marketing, and marketing became one of the most demanding majors in many universities, separate from management and business studies. However, although marketing became an independent discipline, its relationship with other human and experimental disciplines remained, and they helped marketing grow more than ever and find many new methods in the marketing field, especially in marketing research.
The Relationship Era (1990s- now)
However, marketing shed light on many shadows and offered many more effective methods to manage customers and markets, but these weren’t all we gained from marketing. Many marketing methods came from other disciplines and were then reformatted by marketing experts and lecturers, then added to marketing literature and expanded it. After a while, the most important core of marketing took shape, and it was: relationship with customers.
Many marketing experts now believe that their first duty in marketing isn’t sales, advertising, and offering a low price, but their first task is finding ways to build relationships with their customers. From the 1990s and at the same time as the Internet and digital introduction, many in marketing discovered that having relationships with customers is the most important and valuable asset in their business. We can see in the decades later, with the increase in digital devices and the internet, marketers tried to build more relationships with their customers and used these relationships to expand their marketing, compete with their rivals, and gain more market share.
The Digital Era (2010s -now)
The digital revolution helped many marketers to develop and expand their activities and find more markets. However, the digital revolution and data opened new doors for marketers, but it also presented more challenges for them. Privacy, Security, Accuracy, cost, and management of a lot of devices and dashboards in conjunction with each other are some of the issues that marketers encounter in this era. Also, digital devices and the Internet allowed small businesses to compete with big companies and even defeat them in many markets. In this era, many startups emerged and changed many traditional industries.
We’ll have a lot of articles about digital marketing in the following posts and show you how to use digital opportunities for your business.
The AI Era (2020- now)
If you think that the digital revolution was the last station in your marketing journey, you are wrong! Artificial intelligence is behind the door and is changing the market as quickly as you can think. Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) technologies in media, data analysis, and search-related information help marketers do many previously complicated and time-consuming tasks in a few minutes. This speed to reach results helps marketers design better strategies. However, AI technologies are new technologies with undefined impact on the markets, but these technologies and tools are becoming main tools and assistance in many marketing teams.
As you see above, we passed through six eras in marketing, and each era helped us to complete our knowledge and capabilities regarding markets. Do you think we are in the last station of the marketing development process? I don’t think so. However, we are more powerful than past marketing managers, but our journey in marketing isn’t finished yet. Marketing is a live discipline, and its related literature is growing faster than ever. We have many new fields in marketing and also new and complex challenges in many fields, but we are working to find new solutions, answers, and new insight to encounter and overcome them.
In the next part, we want to find a definition of marketing.
Marketing definition for AI era
Each marketing definition is limited to its era, and each marketing era has its own challenges, opportunities, and questions. So, it’s no wonder that you can find many definitions of marketing.
On the other hand, marketing is used in many companies, fields, and businesses. Therefore, to recommend a comprehensive definition of marketing that covers all needs, insights, and activities isn’t easy, and even it is impossible.
Although we can’t claim to have a complete and comprehensive definition of marketing, we can start our work with a simple definition and complete and grow it along our studies. This is a usual and acceptable method in many disciplines and studies.
What is marketing?
To reach a definition of marketing, we should know what marketers do in their job.
Marketing is about finding new opportunities in the current or new markets. When we talk about the market, we point to the other word “demand.” Demand is a need or want that customers are willing to pay for. So, in marketing, we are looking for new profitable opportunities in current or new markets. But how can a company find profitable opportunities in the markets? Each company, business, or organization offers some physical products, services, and ideas to a range of customers. These products and services meet the needs and wants of that group of customers. Each company also has some capabilities and weaknesses to offer its products and services in every market. For example, geographic location, cheap or expensive raw material and manpower, fuel price, and skilled workers can change the power of a company to enter some markets.
As you can see, each company has some strengths, weaknesses, threats, and strengths for each market (or a group of customers that is willing to pay for products or services that meet their needs and wants).
A marketer’s duty is finding the best combination of opportunities in the markets and capabilities of their companies that yield the highest profitability. To protect this money flow, marketers must build long-term and trustworthy relationships with their customers and also protect their share of the market against their competitors.
This isn’t easy because marketers need a lot of data, analysis, research work, innovation, and creativity activities, etc.
As you see, the more we talk about the marketing job and dive deeper into the daily work of a marketing manager, reaching a marketing definition becomes harder, and we can’t find a short and memorable definition of marketing. But we can shorten our definition and not have a comprehensive and universal definition of marketing in the beginning of our study.
I like to define marketing as below:
“Marketing is a logical activity to find profitable opportunities in the markets by meeting customers’ needs and wants with products, services, and ideas.”
This definition of marketing has some important tips:
- Marketing is a logical activity: In the new paradigms of marketing (such as Data-driven marketing) we don’t rely on our instinct, intuition, and attitude. Instead, we make use of logical methods such as mathematics, statistics, data, cause and effect philosophy, and systematic studies to find optimal solutions. However, innovation, creativity, and out-of-the-box thinking align with and are supported by marketing realities.
- Marketing is looking for profitable opportunities in the markets. However, customers have a lot of needs and wants, but there are limited cases in which they are willing to pay for them. Producing goods or offering services involves related costs. If we want to continue our presence in a market, we must pay its costs and also gain profit and interest. Therefore, each marketing manager must find the balance point between their company’s highest profitability and their customers’ lowest cost. It is a hard tradeoff and requires a lot of strategies, data, and other resources to recognize the proper point.
- The third part of this definition is that marketing is looking for a group of customers’ needs and wants. Indeed, what marketing is looking for in the first step is customer’s needs. What we do in the next steps in our marketing strategies are complementary stages of this activity. However, there are a lot of searching methods, analysis techniques, and other resources that help us to find or discover our customers’ needs.
So, marketing according to our definition of marketing, marketing is a logical activity, a profitable search to address a special group of customers’ needs and wants. However, we will add more steps and propositions to this definition later, but for now it is enough, and we can continue our work. In the following part, we will see how marketers look in markets and how they can plan and manage their marketing strategies.