What Is Marketing Truly About - Essay Example

What is marketing truly about? 11 March Firms commonly define marketing as selling their products to s. This is a severely limited definition of marketing because it focuses on the product only. In “Marketing Myopia,” Levitt discusses a much wider definition of marketing. Levitt argues that selling is not marketing and that markets limit their functions and potential, whenever they think that marketing is about the product, and not about the customer. This paper argues that Levitt is right.

Marketers should think of marketing as a process of constantly learning how to produce value satisfaction for customers by studying what they need and having a vision of how that need should be satisfied by the entire company. Marketing is about the customers and the values they seek for the products and services they want to buy. Levitt provides a broad definition of marketing that is not limited to the product or company alone. He expands his definition to include customers and the world they live in.

In essence, he uses a systems theory approach to marketing, because he understands marketing as the sum of its parts. The most important part is not the product system or supply chain system, though they are evidently critical to the business systems of firms. The most critical part is the system where customers are found. This system includes all factors that affect the customers’ buying attitudes, values, and behaviors. Marketing is about knowing this system and producing and selling products that relate to the customers’ system.

The customers’ world is marketing’s world. This paper also agrees that having a “visceral feel of greatness” (Levitt 20) is pertinent to survival in this highly competitive world. This greatness should emanate from the leaders and infect the workplace (Levitt 20). The main point is: “Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing customer creating value satisfactions” and that “It must push this idea (and everything it means and requires) into every nook and cranny of the organization” (Levitt 21).

Marketing supports business vision and goals. The vision is to respond to customers’ value satisfaction needs. Marketing specifically pushes its products/services to customers and the whole company should be part of the marketing effort. This makes sense because when a few employees go astray in the vision, they will think that they are marketing products only and that is wrong because marketing revolves around consumers. Levitt provides a useful, though the expansive, definition of marketing.

The strength of this definition is that it considers the entire systems that affect customers. It also underscores the customer-orientedness of firms, which will support their long-term existence. The vision of this marketing is hard to quantify, however. Firms cannot grasp marketing in this sense when its marketing definition is traditional and limited. Firms should revolutionize their definition of marketing and change their marketing orientations subsequently. The new definition of marketing has its eyes on the most important system, the customers’ system, and that is the path to long-term competitiveness.