The Best on Marketing
Management guru Peter Drucker wrote 50 years ago that there is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer, and therefore “any business enterprise has two – and only these two basic functions: innovation and marketing.”
The American Marketing Association defines marketing as:
Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders. American Marketing Associations’ Glossary of Marketing Terms
Best Articles Ever About Marketing
Marketing Myopia, by Theodore Levitt: One of Harvard Business Review’s all-time best-selling articles it sold 850,000 reprints from its 1960 publication to Levitt’s death in 2006. Levitt urged marketing professionals to think strategically and creatively. “What business are you really in?” is what the HBR article asked. It broke all records for being the most reprinted in the annals of the publication. The issue it addressed was: what was the real “need or benefit” segment that one wished to address, in other words the market in terms of what the customer really wanted in his or her current stage of evolution. It was not defined by the product or the producer’s concerns. It is usual for entrepreneurs, especially those who pioneered a technology or a process to fall in love with the product and to lose all focus.
Marketing is Everything by Regis McKenna, also author of “Relationship Marketing” marketing is a way of doing business that pervades the entire company; companies must dispel their limiting market-share mentality; programmable technology promises to open up almost limitless choice for customers; a feedback loop is making advertising’s one-way communication obsolete; the line between services and products is eroding; and the marriage of marketing and technology is inevitable.
Market Directions “Useful Resources” Section contains links to Census Bureau Data, Other Government Links, Articles about Marketing and Marketing Research, and Market Directions’ own Research. Visit often as new links are added, updates made and lots of good stuff.