I took my marketing101 class today and learned that marketing is about identifying aspects of the consumer such as class, gender, age and lifestyle in order to know what product to create that will appeal and satisfy that consumer the most.
This sounds a lot like the Austrian definition on entrepreneurship where the entrepreneurs task is to forecast the needs of the consumer through some kind of inner knowledge that is unknown to everyone else and grabbing that opportunity to earn profits.
Is the entrepreneur in the Austrian sense the same as marketer in the usual sense?
Mises says somewhere that “promoter” is a better term than “entrepreneur”. This “identifying” you are talking about sounds more like the thymological category of understanding (the character of the individuals comprising a target market) along with the promoter’s historical understanding (Verstehen). This may be relevant. Also see Long’s piece on rule-following:
First, Wittgenstein’s argument sheds light on the relation between economic theory and economic history – i.e., between the aprioristic method of praxeology and the interpretive method of thymology, as Ludwig von Mises uses those terms in Theory and History. In particular, it shows that, just as thymological interpretation involves praxeological categories, so the possession of praxeological categories involves thymological experience – thus enabling a reconciliation of the superficially opposed insights of Mises’ Kantian approach, Murray Rothbard’s Aristotelean approach, and Don Lavoie’s hermeneutical approach to Austrian methodology.
No, what you would call Marketing is a small subset of what Mises would call entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship to Mises is the process of using an idea of what products and or services consumers will desire in the future against all other products and services, determining what resources are desired to produce the product or service, determining if the costs of those resources will be less than the profits supplied by the consumers, and how to organize those resources to deliver the product or service.
Entrepreneurship is a daunting task that almost everyone does to some degree. Everyone is an entrepreneur of some type, they make decisions about how they will deliver their labor to different employers, they save wealth for other entrepreneurs to use, and they make decisions about who they will associate with and when.
There are great entrepeneurs who are horrible at marketing. I think having an idea about a new product or service that people will need or like is different from knowing how to sell it.