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Marketing,
Strategy, and
Competitive Analysis
W
e’ve all heard someone in the course of business say that
“marketing is fluff and hype.” However, the wisest, most
savvy, and most successful businesspeople understand that
marketing is far from that. Marketing is everything you do on a daily
basis to sell a product or provide a service to a customer. Marketing en-
compasses every way in which a customer perceives a business and
everything that generates enough interest from a customer and encour-
ages customers to actually pay for the product or service. As Peter
Vessenes suggests, cash may be king, “but marketing is everything.”
What does it really mean to market your service or product? Of-
ten, people immediately equate marketing with advertising and see
only the amount of money that advertising will cost. However, by defi-
nition, marketing is actually the process by which we offer goods or
services up for sale. Forward-thinking marketing strategists suggest
that marketing is not a “cost” or “expense” but rather an investment,
because much of the benefit of marketing is longer-term and may take
years to fully provide its benefit.
Marketing has also been referred to as a social and managerial
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TLFeBOOK