Marketing refers to any actions a company takes to attract an audience to the company’s product or services through high-quality messaging. It aims to deliver standalone value for prospects and consumers through content, with the long-term goal of demonstrating product value, strengthening brand loyalty, and ultimately increasing sales.

Professionals who work in a corporation’s marketing and promotion departments seek to get the attention of key potential audiences through advertising. Promotions are targeted to certain audiences and may involve celebrity endorsements, catchy phrases or slogans, memorable packaging or graphic designs and overall media exposure.

Marketing as a discipline involves all the actions a company undertakes to draw in customers and maintain relationships with them. Networking with potential or past clients is part of the work, and may include writing thank you emails, playing golf with prospective clients, returning calls and emails quickly, meeting with clients for coffee or a meal, etc.

At its most basic level, it seeks to match a company’s products and services to customers who want access to those products. Matching products to customers ultimately ensures profitability.

Product, price, place, and promotion are the 4 Ps of marketing. The Four Ps collectively make up the essential mix a company needs to market a product or service. Neil Borden popularized the idea of the marketing mix and the concept of the Four Ps in the 1950s.

Business Insights

A business insight combines data and analysis to find meaning in and increase understanding of a situation, resulting in some competitive advantage for the business. This provides more than a low-level understanding of an issue, giving deeper insight into major mechanics related to the particular business. The steps involved in creating business insights include setting the context of the situation and communicating the dilemma clearly to all members of the discussion. After that, one should be able to state why something occurs in reality and potentially uncover some of the motivations that drive consumer behaviour related to the insight. When one does this, it’s often simple to perform the last step of defining the ideal experience from a customer perspective.