Well if you don't know what marketing is, I guess that any concept out of ignorance suits it, right?
The same as someone saying that a web developer just copy and pastes code, or that a graphic designer just make squiggles in illustrator, and the list goes on.
Not the previous poster but: I've tried picking up things a cut above random pop books about marketing and haven't found any depth there. If you have any links to somewhere I can actually do a deep dive on marketing, I'd appreciate it.
To this day I still think Principles of Marketing by Philip Kotler it's the best book to give you as close to foundational knowledge you can get, and you can go from there to get depth further into the disciplines that compose it - like advertising, distribution, etc.
Some people criticize Kotler because he "only studied marketing", didn't practice it. I don't see anything wrong with that, specially after being adopted as a standard for decades.
If you want "theory" lookup Bernays and read his books about propaganda. Something more practical is anything David Oglivy has written. For copywriting check out "The Adweek Copywriting Handbook" by Sugarman. Unfortunately, I can't recommend any design specific books as I'm a media buyer and trash at design.
I'd go one step farther from "read anything David Ogilvy has written" to "read everything David Ogilvy has written" starting with Ogilvy on Advertising. It's fun and light and valuable even if some of the ads do feel wonderfully retro (they were not retro, however, they were incredibly disruptive innovations that worked so well they redefined how we think about business communication, and this is where they started). The man did invent the notion of modern quantitatively driven marketing, after all. Yes, some of the things he talks about pertain to an earlier era, but all of them remain relevant today and there is value in thinking about how to translate concepts he discussed for print advertising to online contexts.
"Marketing" is a broad term; it's like saying 'what's a good book on software engineering?' What are you wanting to learn about marketing? There are interesting books that give you lots of tactics for early-stage startups (Traction by Gabriel Weinberg, for example); books that tell how to think about Brand Strategy (for example, Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller); books that delve into psychology (Influence by Robert Cialdini); and many other things. Marketing encompasses high-level strategy, brand, research, market sizing, messaging, positioning, product marketing, social media, content marketing, PR and earned media, grassroots marketing, and the list goes on. Within each of these topics there are many different approaches and philosophies. High-level pop books will be fairly light on how each of these work.
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore is a classic for tech companies. It's not about the discipline of marketing, but more of a representation of what marketing looks like in practice. (And, perhaps to the astonishment of many, in practice it does not always look like a pyramid scheme.)
