*Differences Between Marketing and Advertising

Differences betwee
Marketing and Advertising

Marketing and Advertising may sound similar, but to a professional marketer they are separate and distinct. Advertising is only a part of the bigger game called Marketing. Marketing encompasses complete conceptualization of a brand right from research to designing to advertising to sale. Advertising, on the other hand is a component of the marketing process which is nothing but conveying the message through a variety of mediums to promote your product.

The above statements are not intended to play down the importance of individual marketing components, such as advertising. In itself, advertising is one of the most important components of a marketing strategy. It is also the most expensive. Therefore, it behooves any business owner to get some professional advertising training and experience through knowledgeable advisors.

Advertising constitutes sending the message across the public communication spectrum about your company, products, and/or services. It also constitutes much of the behind the scenes work like the process involving formation of various strategies and coming up with a right one to target your viewers. The strategy consists of planning things like placing ads, deciding what media to use, what time, frequency etc. The advertisements are generally placed via mediums like television, snail mail, newspapers, internet, emails, radio, magazines, mobile messaging, flyers, billboards etc. The most popular one is of course television, although advertising on the internet is becoming increasingly popular too.

The easiest way to differentiate advertising from marketing is to consider marketing as a cake and if you cut the cake, advertising as one of the pieces of that cake. The other pieces of the cake are market research of the product, product designing, media planning, PR, product pricing, customer satisfaction, customer support, sales, and many more. All of these components or pieces of the cake should work independently, yet symbiotically with the others in achieving the bigger goal i.e. sell product and build your company’s reputation in the marketplace.

Marketing is a marathon process involving many tasks that involve hours, sometimes days, of research. The research part of marketing takes the longest duration as it involves thoroughly understanding the behavior of people towards the product, as well as their behavior to the method of introducing and selling it. Designing the product and developing an advertising strategy is also a time consuming process. The only components that take less time are the actual executing of the advertisements and making the sales. Marketing can also be perceived as the entire medium between the consumer and the company.

Many companies often make the mistake of confusing advertising with marketing. They try to ape big companies like Coke and Pepsi in advertising, but they simply ignore the work that goes behind that. The classic example of this is excessive energy placed on logos and brand recognition. Many business owners are hysterical about the logo of their company in their advertisements because they think that logo or brand recognition alone will simply bring in the sales. But what makes a logo works is none other than the reputation of the company and that logo must have a feeling to it. It should truly reflect the company’s values. One should also remember that these companies spend fortunes on advertising that feeling, something a new start up business can’t duplicate.

There is a classic example often cited using Eveready’s ‘Energizer Bunny’ as an example. After millions spent making the Bunny a household memory, countless surveys showed the majority of consumers thought the bunny was advertising Duracell. And during the time of heavy Energizer Bunny ads, the only battery company to actually realize a significant increase in sales was neither Eveready or Duracell, and that third party company had done no logo or brand recognition advertising to speak of. Instead, they had spent their advertising money on ads emphasizing their lower cost.

Rather than spending unnecessary money on branding your product, you should invest money and time in communicating to the consumers that they can address their expectations from the use of your product or service, whatever they may be. After building a reputation and growing to a large size company, you may be in a position to gratify your corporate ego with branding expense, but perhaps the above lesson will encourage you to spend your hard-ea
ed dollars elsewhere.

Educating consumers on the benefits of your product and service also helps as it will give them an understanding that you know what you do and are one of the best at doing that. Smart marketers are aggressive in this educational approach rather than passive. They provoke reader’s minds by prompting them to do something rather than just making them knowledgeable of the product.

Smart marketers also bring home the names, addresses and contact numbers of people who are really interested in hiring your company by employing aggressive marketing. Thus having a good marketing campaign speaks a lot about the company and its products. Advertising gives that finishing touch to the hard work done by the marketing people in selling that product or service.

If you are a small business owner, all planning, strategizing, product/service development, marketing, advertising, and selling may be done by you or a small team. This doesn’t mean you spend less time in planning and preparing. It just means you have more things to do and more areas to develop expertise in. If you are unwilling to spend that time in the educational process, your odds for success become much riskier to say the least.

Richard Loewenhage

CEOnwww.LivingMyLifestyle.com