Chapter 50
What Is Marketing?
We thought it would be good to balance out some recent talk on the Web about what is marketing. Here's our view.
We've noticed that on a well-known marketing web site (actually, it's on the ClickZ.com web site), there is an article with a similar title—just what is marketing? This is a very good question, and the answer typically ends up (as it is in the aforementioned article) being a lot of tactics, like advertising, brand management, sales, service, pricing, e-mail marketing, and so on. That's a good start, but far from complete.
And that's one of the problems with the Web. There are lots of web sites out there with people claiming to be knowledgeable about marketing. In fact, if you go to search engines like Google and type in marketing, you'll come up with over 16 million web pages! By the time you've got that many people claiming to be experts in marketing, it's difficult to even know what marketing means.
Marketing Is Not Tactics
When most people think of marketing, they think of marketing tactics. People associate marketing with tactics, partly because they're fun. Advertising is fun, promotions are fun, and so is sending out e-mail campaigns and every other similar tactic. But tactics, while the most salient aspects of marketing, are similar to the tactics of sport. They're very important, but useless without having a sound basis of knowledge.
And so it is with marketing. Marketing is far more than tactics. Marketing is analysis, ...
