[pakitan]

You're confusing paid advertising with marketing. Marketing is interweaved in almost any business activity. No marketing means you literally register a company and then wait in your house for someone to randomly walk in and pay you for you services. And if that miraculously happens, you treat them as badly as you can and do the worst possible job, just to make sure you don't inadvertently get some word of mouth referrals.

[Veuxdo]

This is a good point that I'm glad you called out. Having a logo is marketing. Having a website is marketing. Every blog post, tweet, like, reshare, etc. is marketing. This comment could be considered marketing if you look hard enough.

[imtringued]

Marketing is the act of bringing a product to the market in such a way that it is received well.

Product, price, place, promotion.

All of those are marketing. Yes, even the product itself is marketing. When people claim they are not doing marketing, but going by word of mouth, they are using the product itself as marketing.

[yojo]

You’re right that I was implicitly referring to top of funnel marketing - things you do to make people aware of your business and get them to your business. And yes, I was most focused on advertising.

I would argue that customer service and the actual job done are part of the product, since they’re part of the value you’re delivering to the customer. By that logic one could include the warm fuzzy feeling they get from some really slick copy, but to my mind it feels different. I’m having trouble formalizing the line here.

I’ll also concede that there are things that fall under the aegis of “marketing” that are not direct transfers of money for placement - e.g. cold calling, content marketing, SEO, etc. many of them are zero-sum games, a few are not.