Marketing is an interplay of art and science, and the practice of seeing things from your customer's perspective to create value that fulfills the customer’s needs, wants and interests at the right time and place.

Marketing is also about conceiving and developing the means of engaging your customer's senses to deliver messages and experiences designed to persuade the relevant audience to take action. You want your customer to buy, connect, remember, embrace, and participate with a like/share/comment.

This definition applies to marketing of the past as well as marketing tomorrow. Fundamentally, the discipline of marketing - what marketing is - will always remain the same. Marketing will eternally be about having something interesting to say, show and offer, and finding compelling ways to do that. However, the how and the why of marketing are continually changing.

Finding Relevance

In our current ever-changing, ever-fragmenting competitive landscape, what consumers find “interesting” and “compelling” today may not be as relevant tomorrow. The scope, purpose and level of complexity in marketing is expanding, calling for more sophisticated approaches.

To help understand the changing world of marketing, let’s review the critical concepts that are shaping the how and the why of marketing: the view from consumers, omni-channel: a customer-based ecosystem, and modern marketing from a macroeconomic perspective.