Today you go to the internet. Even then, you used to have to go to Wikipedia, or Merriam-Webster.com to look something up.

Now the search engines “feed you” immediate answers to your questions.

Bing is the number 2 search engine to Google. Larry recently found a definition on Bing for “marketing.

Bing’s definition is weak. Here it is:

mar·ket·ing

[ˈmärkədiNG]

NOUN – the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.

It does include promoting, advertising and selling, but it’s missing a whole lot more.

Bing’s definition is weaker than the definition Larry learned in 1967 at the University of Southern California.

Taken from the revised 1960 definition by E. Jerome McCarthy’s Basic Marketing A Managerial Approach we find: “Marketing is the performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from producer to consumer or user in order to satisfy customers and accomplish the firm’s objectives.”

Bing’s definition doesn’t incorporate product development, pricing, reviewing potential or actual customers including segmentation. Plus distribution and partnerships.

How do you analyze customer needs and wants plus purchasing?

Defining a target market requires market segmentation; the process of segmenting the entire market as a whole and separating it into manageable units based on:

• • • Demographics
    • Geographics
    • Psychographics
    • Behavior
    • Technographics or technographical characteristics. Understand your potential consumer. Remember, in the back of your mind, that the reason technology is phenomenal is because it displaces years, or centuries, of previous technology. Consumers may or may not have the skills. Think employees here too. The reason technology skills are transitory is because they will almost certainly be displaced, too.

Since search engines are where people go for answers, we’d like to see a better definition of marketing. It really should incorporate many or all of the  nine P’s of marketing. As Larry tells us: Be sure the company is taking good care of their customers (People), and having the right Planning and targeting (People), the right Product, right Place or distribution, right Price, right Promotion, right Partners, right Presentation, with the right amount of Passion.

NOTE: Bing and the Bing symbol are registered trademarks of Microsoft.