Marketing
Strategy and planning
Strategy and planning
Marketing is everything you do to create value for a group of people and deliver it to them: understanding what they need, shaping an offer, pricing it, making it available and communicating about it.
The classic definition is about exchange: you provide something of value, someone gives money, time or attention in return. That starts with choosing who you serve and which problem you solve, not with advertising. Advertising makes the choice visible; it cannot repair a wrong one.
In practice it covers four kinds of decisions: the offer, the price, where people can buy it and how you communicate about it. Online marketing is not a separate discipline — it is the same decisions with digital channels and measurement attached.
Marketing is not sales. Sales is the transaction with one customer; marketing is why that customer arrives at your door in the first place, and why they stay.
In practice
Treating marketing as output: a campaign, a post, an ad. If positioning, offer and price are off, better output only tells people faster that it is off.
Related terms
- Marketing mixThe marketing mix is the classic set of choices around your offer: product, price, place and promotion — for services extended with people, process and physical evidence.
- Marketing planA marketing plan sets out your audience, the result you want, the channels and the budget — and how you measure whether it works.
- PositioningPositioning is the place you occupy in your audience's mind: who you're for, how you differ, and why that difference matters.
- BrandingBranding is deliberately shaping how people think and feel about your brand — through positioning, identity, language and behaviour.