And it’s certainly not advertising.

It’s much broader than that. In fact, I’ll let Peter Drucker, the inventor of modern management, explain it to you:

“Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customers’ point of view.”

That quote, pulled from Drucker’s famous The Practice of Management, is one of my favorites on the subject of marketing. It is so simple, yet it says so much.

It says that marketing is the driving force of the business. Anything that affects how the end user will see the business is in the marketing domain. It’s up to marketers to know that, and for the rest of the organization to respect it.

As marketers, we are responsible for the entire customer experience, from the moment they first become aware of who we are and what we do, to the level of satisfaction they have after purchasing our products.