Defining “Marketing”

This is how the American Marketing Association defines its trade: “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.”

The definition is from 2017, according to the web page, and was created by a panel of scholars. Boiling down the Soviet-grade committee-speak to its essence, the AMA believes marketing is about institutions making offerings to customers. In other words, getting people to buy stuff.

I realize the AMA may be the Oldsmobile of industry groups, but it’s not alone in clinging to a outdated idea of marketing. Everyone from Forbes to HBR to Investopedia proffers definitions in similarly antiquated terms.

 So I did what any 13-year-old with an iPhone would do: I asked an AI.

Chat GPT is dead-on about one thing: I do appreciate a fresh turn of phrase. But if one compares its answer, which required fewer than 5 seconds and 5 cents to produce, to the AMA’s, one can see why it may influence the future of marketing far more than a band of bloviating scholars rambling toward irrelevance in a ‘78 Cutlass Supreme.

— Paul von Zielbauer