Yesterday, Philip Kotler and Peter Drucker told us that marketing is finding opportunity, influencing demand, attracting response, creating value, and profitably dominating markets in the process of creating customers.

While that may be the world’s first mash-up definition, I like it. It reflects what I continue to learn – marketing is not a step or an activity, it’s a process.

It’s not a perfect definition, however, because while it captures the broad concepts well it basically ignores a whole set of fundamental marketing tasks – segmentation, targeting, positioning, the famous four P’s (product, price, place, and promotion) and the almighty branding. Plus it lacks any suggestion of what Kotler calls control (feedback, evaluation, revision and improvement).

Jeez, this isn’t a process it’s an entire little universe.

The Marketing Management Process, Adopted from Kotler on Marketing (click to enlarge)