Like most human inventions, marketing resists definition. Business schools have spent decades trying. Textbooks are full of neat formulations. Classrooms repeat them with confidence. Marketing ignores them all. It changes shape too quickly, spills across functions, and escapes every container built for it.
There have been many earnest attempts to define it. Years ago, a business magazine carried a three-word slogan on its cover: Business is Marketing. The line stayed with me. It was sharp and memorable. But it may have defined business more than advertising. If business is marketing, does the reverse also hold? Not quite.
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Philip Kotler’s marketing definition
Philip Kotler’s classic definition is still the most serviceable: marketing is meeting needs profitably. It is elegant, compact, and useful. But it no longer covers the full field. Marketing today does much more than identify needs and respond to them at a profit.
Another widely cited definition, from Ramaswamy and Namakumari, describes marketing as the delivery of a standard of living to society. That came closer to the truth for its time. Marketing did expand access to goods, services and lifestyles. But even this definition now feels dated. The field has moved well beyond visible standards of living.
Marketing now reaches beyond utility
Contemporary marketing enters spaces once considered outside commerce. It does not merely influence what people buy. It shapes how they see themselves and how they wish to be seen. It works on persona, aspiration, status and display. Trends, fashions and social cues do not arise in a vacuum. They are cultivated, amplified and circulated by marketers with increasing precision.
That is why marketing can no longer be understood only as the delivery of products that improve material life. It now operates in the territory of self-image. It offers symbols as much as goods, belonging as much as utility, and often the promise of happiness rather than the satisfaction of a concrete need.
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Marketing still begins with value creation
Yet that is only half the story. Marketing is not merely a machine for manufacturing desire. It is also the discipline through which firms understand demand, design offerings, segment customers, set prices, choose channels, manage service and build retention. The old language of value creation and exchange still matters. Without it, marketing becomes indistinguishable from manipulation. A consumer goods company, a bank, or an airline cannot survive on imagery alone. Marketing still links the firm’s product, distribution, pricing and customer experience to the market it wants to serve.
That older architecture remains central even when it is less visible. Market research, product positioning, channel strategy and after-sales service are not decorative appendages. They are part of marketing’s core task. The failure of older definitions lies not in what they included, but in what they could not anticipate.
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Digital platforms make marketing harder to define
What those definitions could not foresee was the platform economy. Algorithms, personalised feeds, surveillance-based advertising, influencer networks and recommendation systems have altered both the method and the scale of marketing. Marketing no longer speaks to a crowd through print or television alone. It watches, infers, nudges and adapts in real time. It follows the consumer across devices, platforms and moods. The distance between persuasion and behavioural influence has narrowed sharply.
This digital turn explains why the field now appears more invasive and more diffuse than before. Desire is not merely identified; it is tracked, predicted and cultivated. Visibility is bought, engineered and optimised. The marketer is no longer just a seller with a message, but a system with data, timing and precision.
Come to think of it, marketing has become the art of selling some semblance of happiness to a society that is never fully satisfied. It no longer stops at serving needs and wants. It often creates them, enlarges them, and then offers tailored satisfiers for them.
That is why marketing is more difficult to define now than it was in the past. It will remain so. It will keep expanding, absorbing new tools and entering new zones of life. Every definition will lag behind the practice.
Dr Sachin Sinha is Associate Professor at Christ University, Bangalore.