What is Marketing?

What exactly is marketing? How does it work? Most are at least somewhat aware of this concept, but regardless of previous knowledge, virtually everyone has been subjected to it. Let’s take a closer look at explaining this important business function.

A Basic Definition

As rudimentary as it may seem, a review of the basic definition gleaned from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary can explain a lot about this subject. The entry explaining it is short but quite telling, “the activities that are involved in making people aware of a company’s products.” Therefore, to market is to make others aware of a product or company. Any activities engaged in for this purpose are thus considered to be forms of this. Another term for this is “advertising”.

Scale of the Practice

The sheer scale of global efforts that market products and companies is massive. With the advent of the internet, emails, and further electronics technologies, this realm of advertising has become even more prolific. Due to such scale, it then becomes quite challenging to measure or even categorize the many types of advertising out there.

In fact, there are reportedly thousands of ways in which various things are marketed. How, how much, when, and where also shoot the possibilities way up. To get in some specific examples of such advertising in action, let’s narrow it all down and take brief stock of just a few of the popular approaches used out there. You may have seen some of these before.

Common Examples in Action

B2B

When one business markets a product or service to another, it is considered B2B, or business-to-business advertising. An example might by found in a cleaning product company pitching its products to a janitorial service. The customer being targeted is another business as opposed to the average, non-business consumer.

Related resource: 40 Great Value Online Colleges for Marketing (Bachelor’s) 2016

Buzz

Buzz advertising entails creating a buzz, or a generalized sense of public excitement or interest for a product. This involves the tactful placement of a trigger such as a huge prize, unorthodox events, or even the teasing of a major release, absent of sufficient details to dispel any mystery. The level of buzz created here directly affects the ultimate success of the advertising campaign itself.

Celebrity

Attention-getting tactics via the use of celebrities is an ages-old technique that still works today. The concept is simple in that a company pays a celebrity to serve as an advocate for a product. The public, with their love for the celebrity will then be interested in this product that their beloved celebrity also appears to enjoy and use frequently. If the desired results manifest, sales of the product being marketed via the celebrity method will then increase substantially.

Ethical

The advertising companies out there know that we stand audaciously by our morals and ethical views. Leaving no area untapped, the advertisers can then work this angle, providing a perspective to the consumer that their product is the ethical one and perhaps even a moral duty of sorts to purchase. Popular use of this approach today has mainly involved “green” products, or those that are environmentally more responsible than others.

Even at times when the advertisers could seem overly ambitious and assertive, this is for good reason. Those businesses with an ability to market will always do better than those without. For information beyond our basic rundown on this integral business discipline, you can learn much more by visiting the American Marketing Association website.