The Holistic Marketing in the 21st Century

By Shuting Qi and Allison Zwarka

When people talk about marketing, they tend to only think about marketing one product in order to increase its sales. Marketing goes beyond the superficial understanding though. In the 21^st century, marketing is progressing to a more complete system. The term holistic marketing was proposed by Philip Kotler, a renowned author and professor in the marketing field. Holistic marketing is a concept of considering a business as a whole including its position in the economy and in social value to promote a business’ interaction with a broader pool of customers. Holistic marketing has four major parts: relationship marketing, internal marketing, societal marketing and integrated marketing.

Relationship marketing

Relationship marketing indicates that one business should keep a long-term, double-bottom-line relationship to its customers, suppliers, distributors, retailers and other important partners. A strong marketing network can provide more profits to business.

Integrated marketing

Integrated marketing is a concept that uses the target customers’ needs to manage a business' strategies as a whole. Another important idea of integrated marketing is operating different marketing activities in order to create synergy.

Internal marketing

Internal marketing refers to when all of the employees in one business understand and master the correct marketing philosophy of the company. Employees as the internal customers should combine their efforts for one purpose, this will lead to other departments fully supporting the marketing department.

Societal marketing

The Societal marketing is a method to test whether their marketing methods are useful or not for customers. One business would study their products performance in the market and reflect on the feedback from buyers. The bottom line of societal marketing is looking into what the customer wants and considering long term interests in order to create a better product.

Kotler, Philip, Kevin Lane Keller, and Taihong Lu. Marketing Management in China. Singapore: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009. Print.
Agarwal, Ankita. Holistic Marketing. Digital image. Concept of Holistic Marketing. Project Guru, n.d. Web. <https://i0.wp.com/www.projectguru.in/publications/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/pic.png?ssl=1>.