Introducing Marketing (Burnett)

The success of Elvis Presley Enterprises was a result of the insights and courage of Priscilla Presley. Despite her lack of formal training in marketing, she exhibited a creative approach toward doing business that will become more and more necessary as the twenty-first century continues. Innovative thinking has become a prerequisite for success in today’s global environment, which is saturated with near clone products being sold by millions of comparable competitors. The status quo will no longer suffice. The need for constant change paired with clear strategies is now essential.

Marketing constitutes just one of the functions available to every business. Along with research, production, finance, accounting, and a myriad of other functions, marketing contributes to the ability of a business to succeed. In many businesses, marketing may be deemed of highest importance; in others, it may be relegated to a lesser role. The very existence of business depends upon successful products and services, which in turn rely on successful marketing. For this reason, every business person will benefit from even basic marketing knowledge. Moreover, marketing principles have been effectively applied to several nonbusiness institutions for more than 30 years. Bankers, physicians, accounting firms, investment analysts, politicians, churches, architectural firms, universities, and the United Way have all come to appreciate the benefits of marketing.

A word of warning: there is a long-standing myth that marketing is easy. After going through this book you may conclude that marketing is interesting, fun, challenging—even vague—but it is not easy. Whether you like numbers or hate numbers, like people or hate people, like doing the same thing every day or like constant change there are opportunities for you in marketing.

This task of determining the appropriateness of marketing for a particular business or institution serves as a major justification for learning about marketing. Although marketing has clearly come of age during the decades of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding about the meaning and usefulness of marketing. For most of the global public, marketing is still equated with advertising and personal selling. While marketing is both of those, it is also much more.

The business community can attribute a partial explanation for this general lack of understanding about marketing to the uneven acceptance and adoption of marketing. Some businesses still exist in the dark ages when marketing was defined as “the sales department will sell whatever the plant produces”. Others have advanced a bit further, in that they have a marketing officer and engage in market research, product development, promotion and have a long list of marketing activities. More and more businesses firmly believe that the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous, meaning that the marketer knows and understands the customer so well that the product or service is already what is wanted and sells itself. This does not mean that marketers ignore the engineering and production of the product or the importance of profits. It does suggest, however, that attention to customers—who they are and who they are going to be—is seen to be in the best long-term interest of the company. As a student interested in business, it is beneficial for you to have an accurate and complete comprehension of the role marketing can and should play in today’s business world.

There are also several secondary reasons to study marketing. One we have already alluded to in our discussion on definitions: The application of marketing to more nonprofit and nonbusiness institutions is growing. Churches, museums, the United Way, the US Armed Forces, politicians, and others are hiring individuals with marketing expertise. This has opened up thousands of new job opportunities for those with a working knowledge of marketing.