中国大学MOOC: The Business of Marketing1. Ask the average person on the street what marketing is and they’ll tell you it’s about “selling stuff”. That’s fundamentally true, but marketing is not simply the act of sales, but how that sale is made. We are all surrounded by marketing 24/7 and each of us is already a marketer in our own way.2. How do the professionals define marketing? According to the American Marketing Association, “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.”3. The World Marketing Association defines marketing as “the core business philosophy that directs the processes of identifying and fulfilling the needs of individuals and organizations through exchanges which create superior value for all parties.”4. And finally, the U.K.’s Chartered Institute of Marketing says that “marketing is the management process for identifying, anticipating and satisfying consumer requirements profitably.”5. If we just look at the commonalities of these three definitions, we can see that, in essence, marketing is: a) discovering and giving consumers what they want and need, and b) doing this at a profit.6. Professor Jerome McCarthy of Michigan State University wrote a book in the 1950s and defined the 4 Ps of marketing: product, place, price and promotion. This book provided a clear structure to the oldest profession on the planet and became the very definition of marketing.7. In order to better understand marketing, develop your own definition of the term. For example, I think of marketing as the manipulation of product, price, distribution, promotion and people to satisfy consumers at a profit. Manipulation is a charged word, especially when we talk about manipulating people. However, manipulation is important because as a marketer, I control each of the tools of marketing and manipulate them to maximize impact on the market. 8. As a marketing manager, I manipulate what a product looks like, smells like, and feels like. I manipulate how much should be charged for my product. I manipulate tools in my promotion tool kit in hopes of enticing consumers to buy my product. There are the 4 Ps of marketing as highlighted by McCarthy. To these we have added a fifth P: people.Questions: 1. How many definitions of marketing can you find from paragraph 1-5? 2. And which is better according to what youve learnt about definitions?