A number of businesses have given different definitions of marketing. This is because marketing is a wide topic that cannot be fully captured from a single perspective. Gattorna has advanced that “marketing is the social process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others.” Barney on the other hand intones that “marketing is the management process that identifies, anticipates and satisfies customer requirements profitably.”
The use of McCarthy’s four been has been used by Barney in stating that “marketing is essentially about marshaling the resources of an organization so that they meet the changing needs of the customer on whom the organization depends.” A more recent definition that matches capabilities and demands of the market has been presented by Caniëls and Gelderman in stating that “marketing is the process whereby society, to supply its consumption needs, evolves distributive systems composed of participants, who, interacting under constraints – technical (economic) and ethical (social) – create the transactions or flows which resolve market separations and result in exchange and consumption.”
Whereas the terms of the definitions differ, it is discerned that marketing efforts are customer-focused. In addition to the above, all the four above definitions aid in the fact that marketing as a process is a philosophy, not an event in an organization, and demands careful allocation of resources. The broad recent definition that has been advanced by Gottfredson and Puryear however, tries to include all elements and systems that constitute marketing from product development to customer level.
