Defining MarketingThe term marketing in conversation tends to trigger thoughts of sales and/or advertising. Although both functions are intimately involved in the marketing process, it would be incorrect to believe that marketing focuses solely on this. In fact, this may have been a truth in the past, but times have changed and that change has brought about a major overhaul in the field of marketing. The much larger, demanding and competitive markets have required organizations to redefine marketing in a whole new light and therefore depend on the marketing function to maintain a competitive edge in the market. This article aims to first identify and discuss the definition of marketing as it is applied today, then to discuss the importance of marketing for an organization and finally to cite examples of the effect of marketing . There are many definitions of marketing and they all tend to have some truth. The definitions in this article come from two sources highly involved in the marketing process and one source who is a student in his first marketing class. The first definition comes from the American Marketing Association and states that marketing is "an organizational function and set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and managing customer relationships in a way that benefit the organization and its stakeholders. (AMA, 2006) The second definition to consider comes from the text titled Marketing Basics and states that "marketing is the performance of activities that seek to achieve an organization's goals by anticipating customer needs and directing a flow of goods and goods satisfying needs. services from the producer to the customer or customer". (Perreault, 2005, p. 9) The third and final definition comes from a marketing student and is a compilation of a few scraps of information since it is their first course taken on the subject The third definition says that marketing is a department within an organization that is responsible for identifying potential changes in the market and developing plans for exposure to that market by researching, compiling. , developing, initiating, monitoring and fostering relationships both internally and externally seen in the previous paragraph, marketing is defined in different ways, but they all tend to maintain the basic idea that marketing is more involved. in the daily functioning of an organization such as making sales or creating advertisements..