I often lol when I tell people that I studied marketing and the first thing their mind go towards is selling.
This has made a lot of individuals to deviate from the course "marketing " because the society, especially in my country Nigeria where it has not really gained enough ground as a Uni course perceives it to be less important as compared to other courses.
Marketing basically involve the identification of a need in the market place and innovating or creating a new product to satisfy the need identified while Selling is one of the component of marketing that involves the exchange of goods for money or with other goods.
Marketing includes activities such as research, identification of a problem or problems, gathering of information etc but selling is an end point of all other activities curb in the term marketing.
Every one can be a seller but not everybody is a marketer because lots of activities usually take place before selling.
So many of the world well known entrepreneurs are all marketers from the definition above, because they all saw a need and made several research on how to solve the identified need to satisfy the thirst of the needy.
For about 5years or so and still counting, marketing has become a major actor in the society due to numerous competition faced by business men/women. So, in the race for survival businesses engage in different marketing campaign to keep their product in the mind of consumer thereby creating opportunities for various individual.
Marketing happens to be one of key functions of a business, you can build an enterprise and perform well in management, finance, have a solid Human resource personnel, with little or no attention paid to marketing, all efforts will result to nothing.
Therefore, as selling is and endpoint of marketing, same way marketing is and endpoint of an organisational objectives because marketing generates revenue needed to maintain other functions.
Marketing is a sweet and adventurous path that gives you opportunity for mobility especially those of you that hates hooked up in an office chair 355 days in a year.
Finally a seller only cares about his/her profit with much concentration on the product but a marketer is interested on the consumers .