Marketing analysis, opinion, and links by Marian Burk Wood, the author of two Pearson Education textbooks for college students: "The Marketing Plan Handbook" (US) and "Essential Guide to Marketing Planning" (Europe).
Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
Previous Definition (est. in 2004)
Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.
The new definition takes into account input from a broad cross-section of the Association membership. Marketing is regarded as an 'activity' instead of a 'function' and positions marketing as a broader activity in a company/organization, and not just a department. The new definition also positions marketing as providing long term value rather than narrowly as an exchange of money (short-term) for the benefit of the shareholder/organization.
Late last year the American Marketing Association updated its definition of marketing. This clip shows the old definition and the new one, which I think is particularly vague.
The new definition also talks about offerings that have value for "society at large" but applying that part of the definition can get tricky for controversial products such as cigarettes, IMHO.