What is Marketing?

Last month was special, not in one but in many ways.

My first step after college,

my first job as a marketing professional,

my first time experiencing everything that goes into the development of a campaign; from ideation to execution,

and now; my first blog post!

Okay, Alright! Enough about me! Let’s dive into why you landed on this page in the first place, what do you mean by Marketing?

On my first day at work, my mentor asked me if we could sit down for a quick informal discussion, and I delightfully agreed. He asked me a simple question, “What is Marketing?” I was confident, I knew what the answer was, after all, it was one of the most basic things I’d learnt at business school. “Marketing is a management task that links a business to the customer by identifying and meeting the needs of customers -it does this by getting the right product, at the right price to the right place at the right time”, I replied. He gently nodded and said that I got the ‘definition’ right, but if I were to explain it to a rookie, how would I put it? What is that one word or phrase that could associate with Marketing?

I bought his point, the definition was out of a textbook and it sounded way too complex that only a nerd would understand. Coming back to his question, I was clueless; I didn’t have the faintest inkling of what it could be. While I wore a blank expression, he said :

“MARKETING IS ALL ABOUT BUILDING PERCEPTION”

This phrase stuck with me and that’s when I came to realise that the definition I blabbered earlier didn’t quite capture the true essence of Marketing, it was just a very mechanical way of describing something creative. The definition wasn’t helpful and it somehow didn’t do any justice to the comprehensiveness.

 I started to see Marketing differently, I started to see it as ‘Storytelling’

Now if you ask me what marketing is I’d say, “Marketing allows you to build a certain perception by telling stories of products and services that have stood the test of time because they met customer needs and successfully developed a brand image for themselves.” Marketing involves activities businesses undertake to attract customers to a firm's product or service through targeted messages. Marketing aims to provide value to potential customers through content, with the long-term goal of demonstrating product value; brand loyalty and; in turn, increasing revenue in the future.