We witness people often using the terms marketing and selling interchangeably but the term marketing has so much to say than just selling as used as a common parlance among people. To dive into a deep understanding of the difference between the two, I shall now make you familiar with the marketing concept. Mind you, by marketing concept, I mean to acquaint you with what is marketing. and not the marketing philosophies.
The Marketing Concept
Marketing Definition:
Philip Kotler, known as the father of modern marketing defines marketing as a social process by which individual groups obtain what they need and want through creating offerings and freely exchanging products and services of value with others”.
The American Marketing Association defines the following:
"Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large "
To understand the definition in simpler terms,
marketing is a process of identifying and meeting human and social needs profitably
What Does Marketing Include?
Marketing includes a large set of activities such as planning, promoting, distributing, branding, advertising, communicating and of course selling which is just a part of marketing.
Now that we have become familiar with the marketing concept, let us now understand the elements that make marketing and selling different.
Marketing vs Selling:
Assume marketing is a set(suppose set M). Then, selling becomes a subset of set M. So, selling is a part in the process of marketing and is concerned with the transfer of title, possession and ownership from the seller to the buyer for a consideration, being a classic definition of selling. In a simple analogy, imagine a school being the marketing and one classroom of such school being the selling.
Marketing emphasises customer satisfaction through its products or services. But, selling focuses on product development to generate higher sales.
Marketing is everywhere. Right from market research, and manufacturing/rendering of products/services to successful sales conversion, marketing has a pivotal role to play. Whereas selling starts only after product development and hence is limited by its role.
Marketing aims at profit maximisation in the long run by creating value for customers as opposed to selling which maximises profit by generating maximum sales, thereby leaving no metrics for long- run profits.
I hope this article has helped you to understand the major differences between marketing and selling. This would have also helped in knowing which process will start answering your question of how customer satisfaction could be met. I need not say how customer satisfaction affects the sales performance of a business tremendously.
In a nutshell, marketing is all about how to improve your customer satisfaction score.
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