Blackwell Reference Online

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Commonly, people associate selling and →  advertising with marketing. In the old interpretation, this understanding of marketing was quite right, as marketing primarily comprised making a sale. But today, there is more to marketing than selling, promoting, advertising, and publicizing. Selling and advertising are only two of the many tasks of marketing management. Briefly, marketing is about “meeting needs profitably” ( Kotler & Keller 2006 ). But although marketing can be summarized in such simple terms, there are many tasks behind it. Today, marketing can be defined in the sense of market-oriented business leadership. This market orientation is characterized by all relevant activities and processes of the company that focus on consumers' needs and wants ( Esch et al. 2006 ). To focus on consumers and the market, it is one of the basic tasks of marketing to actually find out about relevant consumers' needs and wants ( Kotler 1967 ). Therefore, it is important to thoroughly analyze consumers. If marketers know consumers' needs, the next step is to develop products and services that satisfy them ( Drucker 1954 ). Marketers have to be very flexible, since markets are very dynamic. The management guru Peter Drucker (1954) once stated that a company's winning formula for the last decade will probably be its undoing in the next decade. To be able to react to changes in the environment ... log in or subscribe to read full text