Marketing

According to the American Marketing Association, 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. Marketing is concerned with identifying and satisfying customer needs and wants via development of desired goods and services, pricing them attractively, distributing them conveniently, and informing targeted customers about them through marketing communications. Marketing is the business function that identifies and anticipates customers’ needs and wants, creates products to satisfy those desires, and then delivers a want-satisfying product through various techniques of pricing, distribution, and promotion. Marketing activities generate revenue for a business organization and are built around a firm’s competitive advantages. Industries such as financial services, health care, travel, real estate and professional sports have only recently discovered marketing.

The specific objectives of the Marketing major are to help students develop an understanding of the challenges (opportunities and risks) facing marketing managers and at the same time to help them develop an ability to analyze and respond to these challenges in order to effectively, efficiently, and ethically serve and satisfy an organization’s customers.

The marketing curriculum is designed to provide a background that would be useful for entry-level jobs as well as long-range management positions. These can be in specialized institutions such as advertising agencies, marketing research firms, management consultants, service organizations, and retailing, wholesaling, and manufacturing companies.