What is Marketing - Essay Example

Marketing also covers a range of aspects such as advertising, public relations, sales, and promotions. There is a common confusion between sales and marketing, when in fact the two are very different. The former involves getting a product or service into the market, promoting it, influencing behavior, and encouraging sales. Sales are the actual transaction of getting a product or service into the hands of the customers. Companies without a marketing mindset and proper strategies are at a disadvantage in todays business world.

Particularly those companies that are centered around their products and do not concentrate on their customers, are doomed to fail. Two major factors of marketing are the recruitment of new customers (acquisition) and the retention and expansion of relationships with existing customers (base management). Marketing is a process of continuous improvement. Once a marketer is converted the prospective buyer, base management marketing takes over. The process for base management shifts the marketer to building a relationship, nurturing the links, enhancing the benefits that sold the buyer in the first place, and improving the product/service continuously to protect the business from competitive encroachments.

Marketing methods are informed by many of the social sciences, particularly psychology, sociology, and economics. Anthropology is also a small, but growing, influence. Market research underpins these activities. Through advertising, it is also related to many of the creative arts. The big debate in the marketing discipline is whether marketing is an art or a science. Marketing is a technology or set of technologies. Marketing can be neither an art nor a science because arts and sciences only seek to explain natural phenomena.

The objective of marketing is to manipulate and influence natural phenomena to