Introduction

The study of marketing is an extremely exciting and ever-changing discipline in today’s world. It is fast-paced and strategic. It is innovative and challenging. It is very misunderstood.

If you ask most people what marketing is, their mind goes immediately to promotion or sales. However, marketing is much more as you will learn throughout the pages of this book. Marketing provides clarity of direction to decision makers, it explores the possibilities for growth and development, and it represents the needs, perceptions, and preferences of the target market to the organization.

This text is part of the Open Educational Resources initiatives. Participants in OER share their work and give permission to others to use their material with attribution only. Therefore, this text will include a variety of voices and styles as I glean some of the best material from colleagues to further our educational mission with students while eliminating the cost of textbooks.

I’d like to thank the following authors (most names removed at the request of the publisher) and their works for participating in OER and thus allowing me to integrate their work into this book.

Principles of Marketing; University of Missouri Libraries Publishing, adapted from a work produced and distributed under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA) in 2010 by a publisher who has requested that they and the original author not receive attribution.

Boundless Marketing; This courseware includes resources copyrighted and openly licensed by multiple individuals and organizations. Click the words “Licenses and Attributions” at the bottom of each page for copyright and licensing information specific to the material on that page.

Burnett, John; Introducing Marketing;  A Global Text Project. This book is licensed under the Creative Common Attribution 3.0 license.