What comes to your mind when you hear this word? What’s the first thought that comes to your mind?
Selling?
Advertising?
OR
Something else…? Like ….Shopping?
Traditionally, marketing refers to the means or process by which a seller (or an organisation/company) communicates to, connects with and engages its target audience to convey the value of and eventually or ultimately sell its services and products.
Philip Kotler, defines marketing as the art and science of exploring, creating and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit.
The act of “marketing” involves identifying the gaps – that is unfulfilled desires and offers and/or exchange valuable products in order to fill in that gap – that is the unfulfilled desires or offers of the customers.
And as for me, I had my first stint with marketing much later in life and almost as a “chance” when I enrolled for a post-graduate course at University of Calcutta more than a decade. While taking a look at the syllabus, I found that there was a paper on marketing as a part of the curriculum. While initially I didn’t pay attention to it, little did I know I that I would end up loving—marketing.
Well, for this the first credit definitely goes to my teacher Dr. Rajib Dasgupta who taught us the paper at the university.
While it was Dr. Dasgupta’s excellent teaching method of simplifying the subject worked wonders, what I found engaging were the “stories” that he narrated about various products and how their prices were determined and how they were promoted and different places—at times cutting across international topographical barriers – was enough to trigger my interest in the subject.
And I became so crazy (in a positive sense, of course) about marketing, that before the examinations, classmates started addressing me as “marketer of the batch.” My passion towards the subject or discipline of marketing continued to intensify and by the time results were declared, I had managed to secure a first division in the post-graduate diploma course.
While I started off my professional journey as a content writer, an essential part of digital marketing, within a very short span I moved to the publishing industry. After spending roughly 19 months in the industry with leading players like TataMcGraw-Hill Education (now simply McGraw-Hill Education) I began my first proper profile into marketing with InfoEdge India.
As a part of the online marketing team, I developed content spanning across genres. Gradually I started taking interest into the domain of digital marketing, though my priority remained writing – involving a lot of creativity.
It was not until my stint with CareerBuilder that I started taking serious interest into marketing. I not only wrote extensively for their online marketing spaces but also for their product website. For this, I have to express my gratitude towards my then manager Ankur Tandon and my dear co-worker Supriya (now friend) for their support.
From search engine optimization to social media marketing, branding and event promotions—I got a chance to dabble into all aspects of digital marketing. And that was it.
Since then, I fell in love with marketing!
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