Marketing

Marketing is the customer-oriented process of creating, pricing, distributing, and promoting goods or services. Over the years marketing has evolved from its dedicated, process-oriented roots to become a distinct and integrated component that drives the output of every organization. The American Marketing Association defines marketing as “an organizational function and a set of [Page 873]processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”

For news media organizations, marketing accomplishes three important and interrelated functions: (1) to identify and create, distribute, and promote their products and services to answer to the informational, educational, and entertainment needs of their audiences; (2) to market their products and services to advertisers and third parties; and (3) to increase brand awareness and develop strategies to promote organizational growth.

Both journalists and marketing practitioners use media channels to deliver information to their audiences. This proximity, combined with the need for media organizations to actively compete in the marketplace, has blurred to some extent the differences between marketing and journalism yet at the same time, has diversified and modernized both fields. The advent of new communication channels since 1990 has made it even more difficult to draw a clear distinction, at least from an applied perspective.

Marketing forces continuously shape the journalist's world as the consumer's need for news and informational channels dynamically change. Traditional print media outlets, such as newspapers and magazines, major employers of journalists, have been relatively slow in adapting to modern business models, and to recognize and accept the power of marketing. In an era of troubled media and general economics, marketing becomes even more important.

Journalism deals with information and has a duty to present accurate, factual, and balanced reporting and analysis of news events to its audience. Marketing, on the other hand, and especially the “promotion” component, deals with persuasion, with the need and duty to generate or increase brand awareness and brand recognition, increase product or service recognition and demand, and ultimately increase sales. Journalism at its roots is descriptive, marketing is persuasive. By the end of the twentieth century, information had become a commodity requiring effective packaging to be attractive to its intended audience. Today, content must resonate with audience needs and values. Given the quest for earnings, journalism cannot survive without marketing.

To complicate the picture, news media organizations make a significant portion of their revenues not only by selling information to readers (or indirectly to viewers), but by selling audiences to advertisers. Thus, as news media compete for customers for their advertising time or space, they must provide a news product which, using marketing terminology, must be tailored to the needs of the business (advertising) audience, with a competitive price structure, and adequately promoted. Thus a conflict arises between the need to be objective, tell the truth, and inform, and the need to have a profitable business model and play a part in delivering third-party marketing-driven persuasive messages to readers or viewers that seek the media product because of its perceived informational value.

...