What is Marketing? Differences between Selling and Marketing

Marketing is the process of creating market for your products through selling and business promotional activities. It is a kind of creating communication between prospective buyers and sellers/ producers of goods and services.

But selling is very limited in scope. It aims at simply selling the product without caring for the quality assessment and customer care.

Definition of Marketing
Marketing can be defined as the process of communicating the value of a product or service through promotional activities and brand building, thereby creating a customer base for the business.

It is a set of activities employed by a company associated with the buying and selling of goods and services including consumer research, advertising and selling till the point of delivery of goods to the ultimate consumers.

Marketing process employs both scientific and artistic approaches for selling of these products. Scientific approach because it indulges in the study of market conditions and research of customer tastes and product quality. Artistic because it needs to be appealing to the senses of customers. It employs the 4 P's of marketing - Product, Price, Place and Promotion. These 4 P's determine their marketing activities. The ultimate goal of marketing is to reach to the customers with an aim to satisfy their needs and maintain a long term relationship with them.

Why Selling is Different from Marketing?
Now, coming to the discussion of differences between selling and marketing concept, let us look at the salient features of selling activity and marketing activity by comparing them through this below table.

Differences between Selling and Marketing

SELLING	MARKETING
Narrow minded	Broad-minded
Limited in scope	Unlimited scope
Engaged in simple selling activities	Involves customer creation, selling and business promotional activities also
Sole purpose is profit making	Thinks about customer care, social cause and product quality also
Operates in a limited area	Engages in widespread areas
Limited staff engagement with a sole proprietor as owner	Employs huge staff of marketing and sales managers and selling agents and sales staff
Proprietor himself oversees sales	Marketing manager is head for marketing activities
Selling is done simply by sitting in the shop	Marketing involves field study and field work
Customers come on their own needs	Customer base is created by wooing them

The above are some of the major differences between Selling and Marketing activities.

So you are able to distinguish now the differences between selling and marketing concept and thereby understand that selling is a component of the wider field of marketing.