Definations of marketing.

I searched online for different definitions of marketing and found that:

• The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) defines marketing as: “The management process which identifies, anticipates, and supplies customer requirements efficiently and profitably”.
  
• The American Marketing Association (AMA), defines marketing as: “The process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchange and satisfy individual and organisational objectives”.
  
• Kotler, Armstrong, Saunders and Wong, (2001:5), define marketing as: “A social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want though creating and exchanging products and value with each other.”

http://media3.bournemouth.ac.uk/marketing/02defining/02defining.html

Marketing is the process of identifying the customers wants and needs, refining the businesses offering to meet them and then communicating to the customer how the businesses product or service satisfies those wants and needs.

http://www.businessopportunitiesandideas.co.uk/422/defining-marketing

• Much of marketing is concerned with the problem of profitably disposing of what is produced.
• Marketing is the economic process by which goods and services are exchanged between the producer and the consumer and their values determined in terms of money prices.
• Marketing originates with the recognition of a need on the part of a consumer and terminates with the satisfaction of that need by the delivery of a usable product at the right time, at the right place and at an acceptable price.
• Marketing is so basic that it cannot be considered a separate function. It is really the whole business seen from the point of view of the final result, i.e., from the point of view of the customer.
• Marketing is a viewpoint, which looks at the entire business process as a highly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy consumer needs.
• Marketing is the delivery of a standard of living to society.

http://www.indianmba.com/Faculty_Column/FC750/fc750.html

Our book says in the words of Kotler:-

The process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return."

Different people have defined a simple term marketing in different ways but the conclusion I get from all these definitions is that marketing is the name of the ideas or efforts joint together to promote a product.