The term marketing is used to summarise strategies and measures to promote products or services on the market. This can be done through advertising or market research. An example could be a company’s desire to establish a new chocolate bar on the market.

Marketing is the process of aligning a company with the needs of the market. Accordingly, all entrepreneurial measures and decisions should aim to fulfil customer expectations.

An activity-orientated definition of marketing essentially sees marketing as a bundle of market-oriented corporate activities. More generally, in this context, marketing can be described as a process of planning and implementing the concept, price management, advertising activities and distribution of ideas, goods and services with the aim of achieving an exchange that satisfies the wishes of individuals and organisations. The activity-orientated definition emerged in the 1970s and was strongly influenced by the development and emphasis on the marketing mix.

The relationship-oriented marketing definition focuses on the objective of marketing to build, maintain and strengthen customer relationships through mutual exchange and the fulfilment of promises (and thus the building of trust). However, the relationship-orientated definition in no way replaces the activity-orientated definition, but works in addition to it. It emerged at the end of the 1980s in connection with relationship marketing, which at that time replaced the focus on individual transactions with the customer in favour of a focus on sustainable relationships with the customer.

The management-oriented definition of marketing sees marketing as ‘consciously market-oriented management of the entire company [or as] market-oriented decision-making behaviour in the company’ (Meffert, 2000). Of particular importance in this definition are the company’s internal framework conditions, which significantly characterise the orientation of the company’s activities towards the market; this definition therefore includes the concept of the marketing mix, aspects of market implementation, the idea of market-oriented corporate management and relationship marketing, which explains why this definition is seen as a supplement to the first two. The management-orientated definition was developed in the 1980s, but it was not until the 1990s that it was scientifically penetrated.