Sunday, December 30, 2007

Marketing and Advertising Defined

What do these terms mean?

In a recent MBA course I taught at Neumont University on marketing I had to define these terms. While there are myriads of technical definitions; here's what we came up with to capture the main point.

Marketing: the alignment of a need with a solution to everyone's benefit.
Advertising: publicizing the fact

Thus, marketing must understand who has a problem to be solved and then figure out how to make the exchange of benefits profitable to both parties.

On a side note, Neumont is interesting in that it focuses on two-year Bachelor's degree in Computer Science -- that's it. Students attend college full time, work on industry-sponsored projects, and graduate with 100% placement and above average salary. The founders (and venture capitalist backers) designed the program for what enterprises need in software developers.

No comments: