The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age

Marketing and Public Relations

Most readers of this book will be working in, studying, teaching or researching marketing and/or PR. Others will be working in other disciplines central to influence, such as sales and customer service, or senior management figures or management consultants keeping up with the latest ideas. Regardless, I hope you won’t mind if we invest some time defining both marketing and PR. Why? Well, this book wants to map out a journey from A to B, and navigating to B is so much easier if we’re all at A to begin with. Moreover, experts don’t agree …

Marketing

In its 2009 paper, Marketing and the 7Ps,¹⁴ the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) defines marketing as ‘the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably’. The paper continues:

… the customer is at the heart of marketing, and businesses ignore this at their peril.

In essence, the marketing function is the study of market forces and factors and the development of a company’s position to optimise its benefit from them. It is all about getting the right product or service to the customer at the right price, in the right place, at the right time. Both business history and current practice remind us that without proper marketing, companies cannot get close to customers and satisfy their needs. And if they don’t, a competitor surely will.

However, the CIM recognized in its 2007 Tomorrow’s World¹⁵ paper that its definition harks back to 1976 ...