***this post is a work in progress and I would greatly appreciate your input as this gets refined***
A simple question, right? I wonder if it would be easier to explain what marketing isn’t. For the longest time, I would get asked what I do for work and answer “digital marketing” and that seemed to be a conversation stopper. More recently, I have been getting replies back like “Isn’t all marketing digital”? That led me on this journey of wanting to map out what is marketing.
First off though, here are a few definitions by some marketing greats that do answer the question, what is marketing.
“The goal of marketing is to create customers who create customers.”
Philip Kotler
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits them and sells itself.”
Peter Drucker
“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’.”
Steve Jobs
The image below shows where I have landed so far, the 10 functions of marketing. Although Digital Marketing is one of these pillars and interacts with all of the other pillars, there is a lot to marketing that isn’t “digital marketing”.
