The American Marketing Association has a new definition for the term marketing. It says:
“Marketing is 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.”
The old definition stated:
“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”
As a PR practitioner to be, what are your thoughts about the changes?See the BtoB magazine article, and thanks to Mitch Joel for pointing this one out.
I don’t think I feel a great appreciation for either definition. I read each of them several times, trying to figure out just exactly what the AMA says marketing is.
I found this quote from Nancy Costopulos, the AMA’s CMO, particularly interesting:
“Marketing is no longer a function—it is an educational process.”
It just sounds too philosophical to me. I think I’m beginning to understand what Gary, Christine and Jessie-May are going through when trying to veer us students away from the one-way structured and theoretical university background most of us in the program are coming from.
I just hope marketing, PR and other similarly linked industries don’t stray too far from being understood by the general public. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m tired of getting the response, “So, what is PR?” when I tell someone what I’m going to school for. I realize it’s not as easy to define as some careers, but I think some people are not helping the situation.
Sometimes it seems the harder a group looks at defining itself, the more likely the result will be a broader, generic, all-things-to-all-people definition. PR was struggled with this for years. Another interesting post along these lines is the one by Geoff Livingston referred to on our program blog last month.
On a positive note, the AMA’s new definition of marketing appears to focus on interactivity. Kudos to them for capturing this significant industry trend. As a PR student, I understand that marketing, advertising and public relations are often a highly integrated process. However, this new definition of marketing begins to blend the concept of markets with publics — and seems to bump public relations out of the marketing mix entirely.