Marketing and the public service

Abstract

What is Marketing? Every year at the start of the academic year, I ask this question to freshers, enthusiastic about taking Marketing as their major. The hands-up responses are always insightful. “The ability to get people to click on ads” is a typical response; “understanding consumers to create more saleable products” or “the ability to find a product that satisfies peoples’ needs”, to name a familiar few. Many consider marketing as the ability to sell more for increased profitability. However, Marketing is more encompassing than this. The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines marketing as “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” (AMA, 2017).