" How to do marketing?

It is the first day of the Theory of Marketing class in the last semester of the Marketing program at Universidad de Sotavento. It is the perfect environment for the future leaders in this vast field of knowledge.

What is marketing?

The obvious question I make as I show a slide with the definitions

of marketing given by the leading exponents.

Here are a few of the key concepts:

First by Philip Kotler, the most distinguished author in marketing: "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."

The American Marketing Association defines it: "Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives."

While William Stanton says: "Marketing is a total system of business activities designed to plan, price, promote, and distribute goods and services which can satisfy the wants of current and potential customers."

Even though these definitions may use different wording to express exactly the same, they all share a common implicit or explicit component: exchange.

The author of this book thinks the ideal definition of marketing is: "Marketing is building confidence."

As simple as that, marketing is about building confidence and, further ahead, once we include the marketing elements described throughout this chapter, we will demonstrate this definition. "

" For example, a mobile phone satisfies the need for family safety, since one can get hold of their children. It also gives us employment security by having digitalized documents at hand. It gives us a sense of belonging by knowing we can have many groups of friends to communicate with via SMS, Pin, social networks or Whatsapp. It can even take us to self-actualization, by having an exclusive piece of equipment that not many people have access to.

A single product may satisfy different needs, which is why it is important to determine which need is being satisfied by each product. We could segment a market following a specific characteristic, to develop a more effective and specific marketing

strategy that works from the consumers' needs and not from their purchasing behavior or their characteristics as a market. "

" What is needed now is more talented decision-makers who are able to make this want evolve into wants for products specific to their brands. This is a huge task considering children's game developers have already such a great understanding of their customers that kids can now design the players, name them whatever they wish, build the playing environment, attach their own image- all this in order to customize the game, play by themselves or against other players from around the world, play the game remotely, and become a part of the game by moving synchronized to other players. "

" Whether you want to enter the market of an existing product, or of a new one, the first step is gathering information to make marketing decisions. Speaking in broad terms, and summing up the most widely regarded research methodology theories, there are four ways of gathering information from the market. "

" Most become mesmerized with my statement, because at first, my definition seems lacking logic, and all of them give me a quizzical look demanding an explanation, which I elaborate by saying: "Confidence is a synonym of marketing."