Entrepreneurship, Second Edition

Chapter 5. ENTREPRENEURIAL MARKETING

Nantucket Nectars manufacturing and bottling plant. (Source: Porter Gifford/Getty Images News and Sport Services)

Marketing is at the heart of an organization because its task is to identify and serve customers' needs. In essence, marketing spans the boundaries between a company and its customers. It is marketing that delivers a company's products and services to customers and marketing that takes information about those products and services, as well as about the company itself, to the market. In addition, it is marketing's role to bring information about the customers back to the company. Although many people relate the term marketing to advertising and promotion, the scope of marketing is much broader. The American Marketing Association defines marketing as:

An organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.^[]

Successful entrepreneurs select and optimize the marketing tools that best fit their unique challenges. Marketing practices vary depending on the type of company and the products and services it sells. Marketers of consumer products, such as carbonated soft drinks, use different tools than marketers of business-to-business products, such as network software. Companies in ...