Where do we begin?

I suppose to evaluate what I learn in this class, I need to establish a benchmark – so I can compare what I know about marketing now – to what I know by the end of this course. I will start off by answering the question “What is marketing?” without any research other than my 29 years of life experiences and pop culture.

My initial thoughts are to define marketing as: 

• Convincing consumers they need/want your product or service
• Convincing consumers that your product or service is better than that of the competition

After getting that idea on paper, what is the next step? Scour the internet and see what other people think.  Let’s start with this blog post from today (March 11) from a marketing blog with the title “They Never Taught this in Marketing Class” (how appropriate). The author underlines the importance of “valuing your network” and as a PR guy, he is speaking my language. He goes on to say that marketing is nothing without an audience or community. In PR, we call this a key public. In marketing, I believe this is called a market (customer or consumer) Again, I will come back to this at the end of the C570 course and see how far off I am.

After seeing the word cloud provided by my colleagues in C570, I don’t feel so bad about my initial thoughts. Some of the more popular terms were “product” “service” “customer” “consumer” “value” and creating value for consumers. I’m still a little confused whether marketing is about creating value - or communicating and displaying value that someone else created? Hopefully this will clear up in my mind soon.