What Is Marketing

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In The Practice of Management, Peter F. Drucker wrote, "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer!. [Therefore], any business enterprise has two--and only these two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. They are the entrepreneurial functions. Marketing is the distinguishing, the unique function of the business." This book explores what marketing is and how an enterprise can differentiate itself from others in attracting and retaining customers. In general terms, marketing refers to what an organization must do to create and exchange value with customers. In this sense, marketing has a major role to play in setting a firm's strategic direction. Successful marketing requires both a deep knowledge of customers, competitors, and collaborators and great skill in deploying an organization's capabilities so as to serve customers profitably. Marketing, thus defined, is a broad general management responsibility, not just a function delegated to specialists. Anyone with career interests that lead to the setting and the execution of the strategy of an organization, regardless of its type or size, will require marketing skills and insight. Therefore, this book provides the foundation on which to begin developing those skills and insights applicable in a wide variety of situations: in the old economy as well as in the new; in both service and manufacturing sectors; and in business-to-consumer and business-to-business settings, to name a few.

Author Bio

Alvin J. Silk, the faculty advisor on this volume, is the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. He served as co-chairman of the Marketing Unit and initiated a course in "Brand Marketing" offered in the second year of the MBA program. Silk has been at HBS since 1989. From 1968-88 he was at the Sloan School of Management, MIT, where he was Erwin Schell Professor of Management and served as Deputy Dean from 1981-87. He was a Visiting Research Associate at the Marketing Science Institute and a Ford Foundation Visiting Professor at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, Brussels.