Well, the first word represents the verb and the second word represents the subject. What else do you expect? If marketing is not able to sell marketing then it will defy its name. You will recollect what you might have already heard many times that Marketing is an Art. Now do you think there is any way to teach something which is an art, perhaps Not. Still, marketing is a subject well written and taught in B-schools.
Just to give you some background, I had one of the courses in the first term on basics of marketing. It was nothing but a collection of approaches that marketers take in different situation. There are no laws, theories no rules. This is because marketing deals with human mind, human behaviours and catering to human desires. If it were to me marketing is best taught by field work and the approaches one should take to market product will automatically evolve over a period of time.
For e.g. when one realizes that there are competing products in the market he will automatically highlight the attributes that differentiate his product from the other competing products, marketers call this POD (point of differentiation). Many times he will select a few individual who he thinks are more likely to purchase his product, they have glorified it by giving it a term ‘targeting’. If the customers seem a little reluctant to purchase the product at a given price, he may offer them some free gifts/discounts/rebate coupons, they call it ‘promotion’. He decides upon whether to sell the product by a retail outlet or directly sell the product or sell over the internet, they call it ‘Marketing Channels’.
These points as I have discussed above still is not loaded so as to compete with other disciplines in MBA. So, they have packaged these terms into different terms and called them Mix. So there we see all the Mix of Mix. Marketing Mix, Promotion Mix, Brand Mix etc. and 4Ps, 4Cs etc. There is a book written about these CONCEPTS and it is termed as the Bible of marketing. But at the end of the course I realized that all that 400 pages (or 500, I do not know the exact number of pages) can be summarized into 40-50 pages and the book will lose identity. The book itself is a well packaged product. It includes graphics, visuals and real life examples from the industry. The colour combination and paper quality is good. Finally, marketing as a management discipline and the book, both are selling successfully in the market.Now this is what we call marketing isn’t.
