What Is Marketing?

This entry will explain what we mean when we refer to marketing.

Setting the scope of what marketing is makes our job much easier.

I'm about to delve into this subject boots and all. Get strapped in, this is the nitty gritty stuff where we sort out what exactly we're doing here. Okay, let's go.

Marketing derives from the word Market. Traditionally, market meant the place where buyer and seller would meet for exchange. To understand marketing, we must first recognise that without buyers and sellers, there is no marketing. Also, the term Market now refers to an organisation of buyers and sellers and is not tied to a specific geographical location, like a market!

For example, the 'cars market' refers to all sellers of cars and the group of potential buyers at a location in time.

Okay, so in broad terms our primary focus here is the internet market. That's very broad indeed, however for the time being, we will work from the basis that everyone who uses the internet is included in our market.

Right. The word marketing is a verb that describes a set of actions. There are several processes we link to task of marketing. A popular description of these processes are the 4P's: Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement.

Simply, to be involved in marketing we concern ourselves with having a product, determining an appropriate price, promoting and advertising our product to our potential market and placing - either physically or perceptually - our product in front of our buyers.

The total picture of marketing operations is very much wider than this simple starting point. As a useful reference for you, I have created a Visual Mind^TM Map which you may use as a handy reference. It will help you explore aspects of marketing that perhaps you haven't considered and there are a bunch of great ideas for ways to promote your product in various markets. Check back often as I will be updating this periodically.

There are two ways you can access the Visual Mind^TM Map. I highly recommend you go to the VM website and download a free demo. Simply playing with this tool will uncover thoughts you never knew you had!
www.visual-mind.com

Then you will be able to edit the map I've created and placed here:


Alternatively, if you have a Java enabled web browser, you can simply play with the published map found here: