What Is Marketing?

The book, What is Marketing, is from some Harvard Business school professors, they provided techniques to understand marketing and learn how to use the skills to handle marketing easier. The book was originally designed for MBA students to analyze the opportunities in the market and use the opportunities to design and implement their own marketing strategy.The word marketing usually means how much a company value to their customers and how can the marketers increase the company’s value during their marketing strategy making process. A good marketer needs to be familiar with all the information about their customers, competitors and partners, and have a basic understanding of Customers’ behavior analysis, Business to Business marketing, four Ps – Product, Promotion, Price and Place, Marketing segmentation, target market and product positioning, product and service designing, repositioning and product line extension, advertising and media, clients’ extension and elimination, and the basic math of marketing strategy. Those knowledge in the book is going to help the readers to learn how to be a good marketer.I think the book explained everything the readers need in a very specific way, the explanations are in details and from surface to innate characteristics of what kind of techniques should people use and why should people use those techniques. For example, in page 25, the book explained about Channels. It talks about that channel is a mechanism or network to flow the products or service from producers to customers, from demand generation to physical delivery of the goods, is a connection between the company and the clients. As long as customers needed, channel sales person have to do whatever they can to fulfill the requirement. A marketing specialist Kasturi Rangan from Harvard Business school identified eight general functions of channel, in order to fulfill most of the requirements from client. Those are Product information, customization, product quality assurance, purchasing amount or power, product line’s width and length, availability, Service, and logistics and streams. He also explains why can’t people just cancel one level in one of the channels – you cannot just cancel the responsibility even if you cross out the level. And he also explained the advantages and disadvantages of direct distribution and indirect distribution. Therefore he suggests building a customer-driven system in order to make sure no matter what happens, marketers can still manage and maintain the functions of the channels.The book What is Marketing explains trade and competition in the aspect of marketing, provided valuable background information. They shared the experience they got from the past and that information can be really useful for a long time. The market keeps changing all the time, what we can do is learn the lessons from the past and improve the market bit by bit.

Easy read, practical application and a few gaps that can be supplemented with a good strategy book.If you want to be a better marketer it understand marketing - buy this book.

This is one of my introductions to marketing. It has a lot of information and reads like a textbook. Chapter 2 was by far my favorite. It explored the importance of using modern psychology and neuroscience to understand markets.

Whether you've done marketing work before or have never experienced it, this book does a good job of giving a very high level formal introduction to the things that marketers care about. It is a good starter to spark some interest in specific areas, like new product development or messaging/advertising, which you should then dive deeper into in other books.Don't expect to get very granular detail in any one marketing discipline here!

This book is just a compilation of outdated class notes that are usually assigned by the instructor or can be found on the internet. I was looking for material to supplement those assigned HBS course readings. Kotler & Keller Marketing Management, 14e is a better supplement. I do not work for Prentice Hall publishing and did order that book recently from Amazon.

Succinct text taking the place of a text book. Good choice by the professor.

Pages were old inside, but the book was still in good condition.

Concise overview of key marketing concepts with good examples. Reads easy, light-weight book- makes a good reference of marketing essentials.

Easy to read introduction to finance. I really enjoyed it.